A new episode of Wedded Blitz by Katie Baker is always welcome.
jc-07.21.15

"Did the government shut down Blue Bell because of its two-part plan to both demoralize Texas and seize Blue Bell's distribution centers and fleet of refrigerated trucks to use as 'hidden-in-plain-sight' mobile morgues? And why did those trucks apparently have a military escort?"
ms-07.16.15

"I am applying for your social media specialist position. Though I am a recent graduate with an entirely irrelevant degree in Ancient Latvian Pastel Art Interpretation Through Lithuanian Chamber Music and Hungarian Novelists, I believe my extensive experience in social media maintenance as publicist for the Patriots College Star Wars Club has more than prepared me for the rigors of this position."
ms-07.06.15

I remember how horrible this was, the city was unbearable. Chicago Magazine takes a look at the 1995 Chicago heat wave.
ms-06.30.15

"Just imagine it. The future sprayed before us in black-lit neon graffiti, like our own nicotine-free fairy tale. Us investing a grand total of $1,500 to get the store off the ground. It becoming wildly popular inside of a week. Raising a family, growing old, handing the business down to our children once they're old enough to be douchebags."
ms-06.25.15

"I thought you were a harbinger of Death," I told him. "I get that a lot," he said, peering down at the place on the clipboard where I had signed. "Spell your last name?" Le Blog de Jean-Paul Sartre, by Bill Barol. Via This Isn't Happiness.
jc-06.23.15

Joyce's wife Nora once asked, "I guess the man's a genius, but what a dirty mind he has, hasn't he?" She ought to know.jc-06.16.15

"I was very flattered when Joyce dropped the 'Mister.' Everybody was 'Mister.' There were no Christian names, no first names. The nearest you would get to friendly name was to drop the 'Mister.' I was never 'Sam.' I was always 'Beckett' at the best. We'd drink in any old pub or cafe." This Recording in which Samuel Beckett didn't intend to be a writer.jc-06.16.15

"Mr. Joyce manages to give the effect of unedited human minds, drifting aimlessly along from one triviality to another, confused and diverted by memory, by sensation and by inhibition, is, in short, perhaps the most faithful X-ray ever taken of the ordinary human consciousness." Edmund Wilson's July 5, 1922 review of Ulyssesjc-06.16.15

"You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world."
ms-06.05.15

"So if not best, then what? Nothing. Don't sign off at all." Cheers.
jc-06.02.15

"To spur interactions between departments, all desks will be mounted on wheels and arranged into four-desk clusters. At random intervals throughout the day, a whistle will blow, at which point you should quickly roll your desk into a new cluster. Leftover employees who don't fit into a four-desk cluster will have their salaries docked."
ms-06.01.15

"And so Americans may joke at the expense of the fallen, but we keep electing them to public office. We keep paying to see their movies and download their music. It's the intensely American desire, or arrogance, that celebrates a success story, even if it's someone else's." Christine Grimaldi is Glad She's Not You.
jc-05.28.15

"My great-grandfather did it, my grandfather did it, my father still does it. It's always awkward, like bringing your accordion to work. Who writes poems anymore, let alone reads them out loud?" When The Family Business Is Ribald Wedding Poetry, by Rosecrans Baldwin.
jc-05.25.15

"Listen, you can park your car wherever you want down here. All night long. Wherever you want..." Sexting With a New Yorker, by Jeanne Darst.
jc-05.22.15

"The Rockefellers, the Mellons, the Hiltons, all the great family fortunes started out with con men. Nobody makes real scratch out of nothing without bending a few rules." We Buy Broken Gold, by Clancy Martin.
jc-05.18.15

"As if we are only pulling out of a driveway, I turn right, toward Tokyo. We are underway. Via MeFi.
ms-05.17.15

"Comprised of the tales of both famous and lesser-known criminals from the 18th and 19th centuries and named after Newgate Prison in London, the Newgate Calendar became one of the most popular books of its day, said to be as much a part of the British household as the Bible."
dw-05.13.15

"Although their broadcast signals were often small and local, college radio offered a crucial assist to bands as diverse as R.E.M., Husker Du, Sonic Youth, the Replacements, Minor Threat, the Dream Syndicate, Bad Brains, Bad Religion, Los Lobos, and the Violent Femmes."
ms-05.07.15

"I was one of the thousands who heard this program and did not jump out of the window, did not attempt suicide, did not break my arm while beating a hasty retreat from my apartment, did not anticipate a horrible death, did not hear the Martians 'rapping on my chamber door,' did not see the monsters landing in war-like regalia in the park across the street, but sat serenely entertained no end by the fine portrayal of a fine play."
ms-05.06.15

"And so for now, into it we mash our noses." Upon This Wrist, by Craig Mod. Fantastic.
jc-05.06.15

Clifford creator Norman Bridwell passed away in February, last night I realized he also wrote and illustrated one of my childhood favorites, How to Care For Your Monster, which is still popular with my kids.
bb-05.05.15

"For a book that seems spontaneous on its surface, The Naked and the Dead was written mechanically. I studied engineering at Harvard, and I suppose it was the book of a young engineer. The structure is sturdy, but there's no fine filigree to the joints. Just spot-welding and riveting." Related to the last, Steven Marcus interviewed Mailer for the Paris Review in 1963.
jc-05.04.15

"If you remember a time when playgrounds were practically designed to break bones and picking gravel out of your knees was a weekly occurrence, these stories will surely stir up some fond memories."
dw-05.01.15

"The applicant pool this year was particularly strong, and by that I mean the Admissions Committee once again sent candidates like you multiple enticing pamphlets encouraging you to apply, knowing full well we had no intention of accepting you." An Honest College Rejection Letter, by Mimi Evans.
jc-04.27.15

"But nobody's doing a public radio show where the host sits in chain restaurants in the middle of America, listening to Hall and Oates, Kansas, and Blue Oyster Cult, wondering what went wrong. Yet."
ms-04.24.15

"We're important scientists from Earth. Traveled a long goddamned way to strut around your world holding these clipboards. Even brought a pack of interns just to look busy measuring stuff in the background. Cost $30 billion to transport them across the galaxy. Another $10 million for the interstellar measuring tape."
ms-04.23.15

The typical American consumes more than 100,000 words a day, and remembers none of them. Binge Reading Disorder, by Nikkitha Bakshani.
jc-04.17.15

"JUST ONCE, I want to hear that two like-minded folks spent their entire first date bitching about their lazy, selfish siblings. I want to meet the couple that knew it was love when they both punted phone calls from their long-winded stepdads straight to voice mail." Wedded Blitz! The Rites of Spring. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Katie Baker is the bomb.
jc-04.16.15

"Due to much of the humour deriving from Mr. Pooter's comical tendency toward self-importance, the book has spawned the word 'Pooterish' to describe the taking of oneself excessively seriously."
dw-04.13.15

"I shall begin far away from me; for no one ought to tell the story of his life who hasn't the patience to say a word or two about at least half of his grandparents before plunging into his own existence." Take a few minutes today, for this excerpt from The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass.jc-04.13.15

Related to the last, notes on The Tin Drum (pdf) from Volker Schlöndorff and from the book's author, Günter Grass, plus excerpts from the filmmaker's shooting diary. "...we must compose the images that the reader sees. A memorized Danzig, evoked by signs."
jc-04.13.15

"You'll notice that several of the designers have stacks and stacks of design books and publications on their desks, their Paul Rands, their Vignellis, and so on. This is great to capture. It makes the designers feel good because it allows them to think that one day they'll also design an airline logo or redesign a subway wayfinding system or create timeless animated movie credits when in fact we all know that they'll mostly be creating sh*tty animations in Keynote that only sales managers in the Midwest will see, and more importantly, not even give half a f*ck about."
ms-04.07.15

"But it was't until 1970 that the exclamation point had its own key on the keyboard. Before that, you had to type a period, and then use the backspace to go back and stick an apostrophe above it." So you know, the history of the exclamation point.
ms-04.03.15

"I have an archive of my own email going back 18 years, containing 450,000 messages. One day I decided to make it searchable. Not half-searchable but fully, dynamically, programmably searchable." —Paul Ford.
jc-04.01.15

"You really can find deep-fried anything these days: pickles, oreos, and even celery, which I unfortunately know from experience. And now, large spiders..
ms-03.26.15

"They made music together, took drugs together, formed bands together, slept together. But none of the legends of the Laurel Canyon scene that flowered in L.A. in the late 60s and early 70s--Joni Mitchell, David Crosby, Linda Ronstadt, and others-- remember it quite the same way."
ms-03.25.15

"ASTERISK: What about a documentary? Helvetica had one. AGENT: Helvetica is one well-connected font."
ms-03.25.15

"You wanna know how we did it? How we got away? Basically, we headed down south. That's about it. Remember, this is 1976. No GPS, no FastPass, no Patriot Act. The FBI wasn't even involved. Just this one dude Billy Mack trailing us around Texas in a Pontiac Firebird. Once we crossed the border, Private B.M. just farted back home to his wife or his mom or whatever, ate some soup, and snuggled up in his cotton-poly blend sheets from Sears."
ms-03.19.15

"...the artful dodge in its all-but-infinite variety —the sales pitch, the resume, the cost overrun, the subprime loan, the building of the transcontinental railroad, the credit default swap, the derivative, the balloon mortgage, the missile gap, the housing bubble, the annual report, the Laffer curve, the Facebook page, the campaign promise, the 2003 invasion of Iraq— is firmly rooted in the country's founding." The new issue of Lapham's Quarterly is Swindle & Fraud.
jc-03.17.15

"Two hundred years ago, two young German librarians by the names of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published a collection of tales that would become one of the most influential works of folklore in Germany, Europe, and eventually the world."
ms-03.13.15

Steven Heller on The Debate. "A 1972 argument between two Dutch designers, translated into English for the first time, taps into an age-old friction between art and commerce."
jc-03.12.15

So far, this is the best The Morning News Tournament of Books yet, and we're only halfway through round one. The judgements, comments and commentary are all fantastic. Get on board.
jc-03.12.15

"This little squiggle has a history rich in controversy." The Comma Queen, a film from The New Yorker.
jc-03.11.15

When his wife Nora "discovered that he was 'on another book again,' just a year after the misery of Ulysses, she asked her husband if, instead of 'that chop suey you're writing,' he might not try 'sensible books that people can understand.'" On this day in 1923, James Joyce began the book which would become Finnegans Wake.jc-03.11.15

This year's Tournament of Books is off to quite a start, day two.
jc-03.10.15

"You might giggle at the part about the lap, but the rest of it sounds sweet. Except that 'die' is actually an Elizabethan euphemism for orgasm. No, seriously. (You might want to reread Romeo and Juliet after finding this out.)" Reading Shakespeare Without the Sex Jokes is the Real Tragedy, by Dara Lind.
jc-03.04.15

"When she pinned a xenomorph to a wall with her combat boot and blew its brains out, one exclaimed his delight with profanity, then apologized to me for it. Another boy said Vasquez reminded him of 'this lady who works at Costco.' He didn't say which Costco. There was a wave of applause for Lt. Gorman and Vasquez holding hands as they blew themselves up. ('She died like a boss,' one said.)"
ms-03.02.15

"Warren, think it over and you'll agree with me because you're smart and I'm right."
Warren Buffett's annual letter to shareholders is always a great read, full of common sense. This year's edition, on his firms 50th anniversary is no exception. The good stuff starts on page 24.
jc-02.28.15

"A fictitious country needs all kinds of graphics: flags, banknotes, passports, street signs," she told Quartz. "It's impossible to imagine graphics like these. You have to do your research and you'll find treasures that you couldn't even have begun to sit down and draw until you saw them in front of your eyes."
ms-02.24.15

Just Checking In. For no particular reason Virginia Heffernan and Paul Ford started sending emails to see who can make the other person experience the most profound sense of dread and panic.
jc-02.23.15

"On a recent bleak, winter afternoon in the Flatiron District Paul Schweitzer was once again hard at work, trying to breathe life into a black, jazz-age Underwood typewriter. Behind his spectacles was a furrowed brow and behind that was a tangle of keys, steel, carrying cases and filing cabinets of rollers, spools, levers and keys, a morgue of mechanical guts." Via MeFi.
ms-02.23.15

"His eyes were a little bloodshot and he giggled as he suggested terrible places for me to search. I could hear Kyle calling me stupid, and that I had 'one job.'" Confessions of an iPhone 6, fun piece by Jessie Char. Oh, and thanks for the FN shout-out in November!
jc-02.20.15

"Q. When and how often is it appropriate to use the slash character that delineates terms of similar meaning? A. Use it until just before it becomes annoying." Currently browsing the Q&A archives at The Chicago Manual of Style Online.
jc-02.12.15

"The team also found that, on a microscopic level, the subway is littered with leftovers-evidence of what New Yorkers like to eat. Cucumber particles were the most commonly found food item, along with traces of kimchi, sauerkraut, and chickpeas." Cucumbers, who would have thought?
ms-02.09.15

"Okay, I think I better just let the Mockingbird thing rest. Been trying for decades and just getting nowhere.
I am pleased however to be writing again, this time under the pseudonym E.L. James, whose first book, Fifty Shades of Grey will be published tomorrow. Wish me luck!"
ms-02.05.15

"And yet, to all of the women that I know, especially those in the tech scene, I kinda feel like I owe you an apology... because it wasn't until I took my seven year old daughter to a comic book store this weekend that the universe slapped me upside the head and brought a really serious issue into focus for me.... I never understood it before." Via MeFi.
ms-01.15.15

"It's a little strange when you think about it: Just about every American ninth-grader has never lived a moment without astronauts soaring overhead, living in space. But chances are, most ninth-graders don't know the name of a single active astronaut- many don't even know that Americans are up there. We've got a permanent space colony, inaugurated a year before the setting of the iconic movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's a stunning achievement, and it's completely ignored."
ms-01.14.15

"There should have been photo shoots for hip websites where I'm ambivalently holding a sousaphone in front of a bunch of carpets. But alas, all I have to remember the place is the collection of male hair ties that were left there."
ms-01.09.15

Editor Laura Perciasepe on Videos of People Falling Down, a story by Thomas Pierce, "...a powerhouse of inventiveness and imagination... structured like a symphony that plays back on itself, building to a crescendo of emotion and experience." Amen to that. So great. Get a coffee, put up the Do Not Disturb sign.
jc-01.07.15

"...the only place where reputations are thankfully disposable and honesty reigns brutally supreme." The Top Albums of 2014, by Andrew Womack. This is the best best-of list ever compiled anywhere at any time. It speaks to me, directly through my heart. I literally can not stop reading it. Genius. Poetry. Sublime.
jc-12.30.14

"The parents, in church suits with the mildly stoned look of the truly exhausted, leaned against each other. But their kid? Their kid was euphoric- rapturous, even- because she was riding a coin-operated pink dinosaur that slowly rocked back and forth while playing a chiptune version of Mary Had a Little Lamb."
ms-12.29.14

"This post originally quoted photographer Tom Sanders as saying it takes him five years to get on the dance floor. It takes him five beers." The Year in Media Errors and Corrections. An annual fave.
jc-12.18.14

"I have a rule. When you write six pages, you turn it over and don't read it until you've written the whole thing." FFC on screenwriting.
jc-12.17.14

"More than 20 million stems are auctioned daily near Amsterdam at the world's largest flower market. But the Internet and globalization have decentralized the market, casting its future into doubt."
ms-12.17.14

"I also make my own ink, using the ink of squid I raise myself in a PETA-approved salt-water aquarium in my office. You can meet all my squid during our initial meeting and pick which one you want for the ink on your will or healthcare power of attorney."
ms-12.12.14

"Of course I adore Cheever, because he's so focused on a certain area, on really rounding out one place, giving a full portrait of it." 10 Under 10: Writers to Watch from The American Reader.
jc-12.11.14

"So I gave my son a crash course in video game history, compressing 25 years of gaming history into about four years. At this point, you're probably either thinking I'm a monster or a pretty awesome dad. Maybe a little of both. That's okay with me. My son is amazing, he loves video games, and more than anything, he loves playing them with me. Ready, player two?"
ms-12.10.14

"Gotta win that holiday cookie swap. I'll be damned if Muffy Carrington wins again with those f*cking pecan bars she makes every year. IT'S NOT EVEN A COOKIE. That b*tch is gonna burn, thanks to the $16 I spent on this gluten-free sugar cookie mix."
ms-12.09.14

"That one will be an elevated sandbox, basically, and the twins will use it to build sand castles and dig holes, and some mornings I'll get up extra early and bury myself in the sand, and when Susan comes in to make breakfast for the twins I'll leap up and scream at the top of my lungs and she'll be so surprised she'll spill coffee everywhere! Maybe that will make her love me again."
ms-12.09.14

"We are the mom and pop corner store version of 'the dream.' If Lady Gaga is McDonald's, we're Betty's Diner. And we're open 24/7." Pomplamoose's Jack Conte breaks down the costs for their 2014 Tour.
ms-11.25.14

"On the last two nights of my final flight, I slept on the flight deck, my sleeping bag strapped beneath the overhead windows. The position of the shuttle put Earth in those windows, so when I woke up the whole world was out there in front of me--in that moment, just for me alone."
ms-11.21.14

"Four years later it would be established in court that during the seven and a half months preceding Elvis's death, from January 1, 1977, to August 16, 1977, Dr. Nichopoulos had written prescriptions for him for at least 8,805 pills, tablets, vials, and injectables. Going back to January 1975, the count was 19,012." .
ms-11.17.14

"Within months, he was the personal pilot for the Stones, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, The Grateful Dead and John Denver. He financed the purchase of a Falcon jet by forging signatures on a 300-page loan agreement after a bank turned him down. The planes were a key to the lifestyle he was chasing: More planes meant more money, and more groupies and as much fun as he could handle — as long as he was home for Sunday dinner with his family, like any good Italian-American husband." The Man Who Got America High, by Jeff Maysh. Via TMN.
jc-11.06.14

"Hour after hour, this terrible fever. What the hell am I doing? I kept asking myself. Why am I forcing a fine new machine to pretend it is a half-dozen old, useless machines?"The Sixth Stage of Grief is Retro-Computing, by Paul Ford. Only brilliant.
jc-11.05.14

"In response to the e-mail we all received from Maddie's parents, in which they shared their decision to raise their daughter dogma-free, yes, there will be an altar, but please be assured that the Day of the Dead is a pagan celebration of life and has nothing to do with God. Keep those photos coming!" My daughters read this aloud last night (one had to take over because the first one couldn't stop laughing). A classic for Halloween, Dear Mountain Room Parents, by Maria Semple.
jc-10.31.14

Relink from a few years ago because I love it and it's perfect for Halloween, author Neil Gaiman reads his Newberry medal-winning novel The Graveyard Bookin its entirety. So great.
ms-10.30.14

"And with only a handful of tools, you and your family can easily enjoy the thrill of pumpkin carving right at home. The following tutorial will provide you with step-by-step instructions down the leafy path toward a fun fall experience."
ms-10.30.14

"It isn't every day that a street criminal- a high-school dropout with two felony convictions- is accused of stealing a centuries-old violin worth as much as $6 million. But nothing about the heist of the Lipinski Stradivarius, which galvanized the music world last winter, was normal, or even logical."
ms-10.29.14

"For your jeans to fit correctly, pull the belt loops up a half a foot above your belly button while lost in a worry about the cable bill." N0RmC0r3 Brand Jeans Care and Fit Guide, by Noah Levenson.
jc-10.27.14

"He called me 'Legs' when I was hired as a fashion news aide in 1985, because I'm tall and because he didn't know my name. Eventually I had a byline, a better job and I became 'Sherrill.' In Bradlee's newsroom, you knew you'd made his team when your first name disappeared down the memory hole." Martha Sherrill on Ben Bradlee.
jc-10.22.14

"Death is never kind to artists, but it has been particularly harsh on Algren. But now he is back with a roar as loud as the 'L,' which Algren once described as 'the city's rusty heart.'" Rick Kogan on two new Nelson Algren films.
jc-10.21.14

"I refuse to give you a discount on principle because I know those shoes cost $200 and because anyone carrying a Vera Bradley handbag can afford to pay full price. I own a barn, lady- I wasn't born in one. Besides, you're wrong. I don't take this sh*t back to the farm; I take it to the food bank and sleep the sleep of the just."
ms-10.21.14

"In the Potluck Dilemma, a per-agent algorithm of motivation ("M") and previous performance ("P2") predicts compliance. Mary, for example, brought a blueberry French toast casserole to the last potluck. It was straight baller. She will most likely phone it in next time and bring cheese or something." Game Theory: The Potluck Dilemma, by Jason Hayes.
jc-10.20.14

"Nicole, can you take Matt's temp on the brodal shower idea? But first, find out if he has hot friends!!!! :) Also, Nicole you're not attracted to Matt right?? Don't want another offering to have sex with our friend's husband situation, right Jen? LOL. Awk-ward!" Hey Ladies: Autumnal Shower.
jc-10.16.14

"Already most of the chairs were taken, girls in cargo pants and a few guys who looked like they were chewing on tin foil. Guys like me, I guess. Guys who'd said the wrong thing, looked the wrong way, picked the wrong bird to start plucking. 'Harassment,' they called it. Well, that was jake with me, as long as my suspended license got un-suspended."
ms-10.15.14

"Nothing beats autumn in New England," said His Excellency, the Duke of Fall.
jc-10.06.14

"Serial is a new podcast from the creators of This American Life, hosted by Sarah Koenig. Serial will follow one story - a true story - over the course of a whole season. We'll follow the plot and characters wherever they take us and we won't know what happens at the end of the story until we get there, not long before you get there with us."
ms-10.06.14

"The cycle never breaks; our sordid tales end always with ellipses, not full stops. When yesternight our courtship freshly failed, you saw the cue to take it to the top.--- But now that we are once again apart, I swear you shan't again reclaim my heart."
ms-10.03.14

"There were 20 other people shot that night. But the dad waited, and so I did, too. A father saying good-bye to his dead son. It was a tiny little city tale, and I watched it f*cking happen."
ms-10.01.14

"I miss the time when we were still defined by our music. When our music was still our music. I miss being younger, with a head full of subversive ideas; white cables snaking down my neck, stolen songs in my pocket. There will never be an app for that.
ms-09.30.14

"...all he ever wanted to be was the shortstop for the New York Yankees." John Gruber on #2. Only perfect.
jc-09.26.14

"My point is that it's counterproductive, counter creative, to morally charge the art of working with type. We wouldn't moralize cadmium red or C sharp major when teaching brush technique or the scales. To do so in typography stunts the full breadth of expression that designers need to draw upon."
ms-09.23.14

"The tool chain that created this simple product is incomprehensibly complex." Kevin Ashton on what's in a Coke. Great. Via Jim Dalrymple.
jc-09.22.14

"That Stranger Who Showed Up In Town Sure Looks a Lot Like My Dead Father Who Was Murdered Years Ago When I Was Just a Kid But It Couldn't Be Because I Saw Pa Killed With My Own Eyes Though Looks Can Be Deceiving, Especially Since I Lost My Eyesight In That Horrible Fire Last June.
ms-09.19.14

"No future generation will know the joy of biking through the blistering Central Texas heat and slipping into the cool embrace of Hastings while the Knack or Blue Oyster Cult chases away the summer doldrums."
ms-09.17.14

"Ms. Lyons, Hi, if you are reading this then they killed me. I wanted to tell you that I enjoyed talking to you, you seem like a really great lady. I'm sorry we didn't meet under different circumstances. . . . . Thank you for your kindness. Have a wonderful day." The Witness. Via MeFi.
ms-08.27.14

"This book is the property of the people of Detroit, and must be taken special care of, and not allowed to lie around where injury may happen to it. For damages done to the books of the Library the following fines will be imposed..."
dw-08.22.14

"For nearly thirty years, a phantom haunted the woods of Central Maine. Unseen and unknown, he lived in secret, creeping into homes in the dead of night and surviving on what he could steal. To the spooked locals, he became a legend--or maybe a myth. They wondered how he could possibly be real. Until one day last year, the hermit came out of the forest.
ms-08.22.14

"In a dust,, seemingly empty field 60 miles east of L.A., Dr. Alexis Gray, a forensic anthropologist from the San Bernardino County Sheriff Department, points to a chain-link fence far in the distance, the mountains rising beyond in the hazy heat. 'There are 7,000 people between us and that next fence there,' she says. For almost a decade, her job has been to confirm the identification of every single one of them."
ms-08.19.14

"The engine runs on a mixture of gasoline and holy water. The stereo is configured to only play hymns. Hell, the cup holder only fits grails! Oh, I shouldn't say 'hell' near this thing, it may have some anti-Satan security device. Or maybe they just banked on God keeping it safe.
ms-08.19.14

"That means a child attending her first day of school the day you found out would be old enough to die driving one of your cars the day you f*cking did something about it." How John Oliver Beats Apathy.
ms-08.18.14

"Try discussing a brand new language via Skype with two hearing linguists, plus another via text, who happens to be deaf, and see what you learn." The Medium, by Michael Erard. Fascinating.
jc-08.11.14

"...it looks like there's a decent chance we could be in for record high temperatures today. The current mark is a toasty 98 degrees, set on this date back in 2005, which also happens to be the last time Karen said that she loved me." A Meterologist Works Out Some Personal Issues During His Forecast, by Pete Reynolds.
jc-08.07.14

"Buildings are all very well, but it seems you haven't truly made it as an architect until you've given us something to sit on."
ms-08.06.14

Driving back into the city from the burbs last night, heard a really great episode of Snap Judgement; The Grand Illusion. Elmyr's story is fascinating and Queen of the Night had me laughing out loud.
ms-08.04.14

"Dating theory and Mom suggest that I will meet many other awesome women as I grow older and that I should therefore not stress this Samantha thing too hard, since there are likely 'other Samanthas' out there for me. But is the conclusion of this theoretical framework really just a total lie meant to dupe me into a lonely death?"
ms-07.30.14

Print Isn't Dead, a showcase of outstanding illustration and design work demonstrating and pushing the boundaries of print in all forms.
dw-07.28.14

Lost Scenes from Generic Hipster Indie Romance Films Found in 2076 During a Museum Restoration of an Old Macbook Air and Subsequently Adapted for the Stage During Heritage Week at a Camp for 7th and 8th Graders Later That Summer.ms-07.24.14

"If you want a good early morning airport customer, respond to Angela G. Light luggage, no talking, phone on silent. I knocked off one star because she said NW corner and she was actually on the NE."
ms-07.14.14

"Inevitable ruin haunts Orwell's book because it's what lurked around his writing desk at the edge of this island." Chasing Orwell's Ghost.
ms-07.03.14

"Fretful, melancholy, untalkative, dissatisfied and sickly," On this day in 1883 Franz Kafka was born in Prague.
jc-07.03.14

"As you enter the main area, you will see an EKHARD oiled solid-oak dining sideboard. Quickly kick it apart to acquire the TABLE LEG WITH NAIL." IKEA Walkthrough v2.3.1, a classic from Matthew Baldwin.
jc-07.03.14

The great Ben Kay writing about Always' "Like a Girl" campaign and the continued Dove-ifyed faux altruism.
sd-07.02.14

The NY Times comes to the rescue and validates an argument I've been having for years, that Walgreens is missing an apostrophe. In this story, they call the company simply "Walgreen," which is correct. Bless you, Grey Lady.
sd-07.02.14

"My first memory is of my father carrying a hammer into our bedrooms and smashing open our piggy banks on the night Roberto died." A Drive into the Gap by Kevin Guilfoile.
jc-07.02.14

"His paintings of apples confused critics and art enthusiasts alike. People were astonished that apples could look so ugly, and be so poorly painted. Some thought Cezanne's still lifes were actually a joke, or an insult."
ms-06.30.14

"...usage guide authors find themselves in the role of pornographers serving a community of masochistic perverts."
I expect Mr Pullam's talk at the Cambridge Symposium on Usage Guides and Usage Problems is going to get some attention.
jc-06.27.14

"Gazing down at the motionless escalators, dead plants and empty benches below, he adds: 'It's still beautiful, though. It's almost like ancient ruins." The Death of the American Mall.
ms-06.27.14

"Renk has watched his fights captivate fans, even though many don't follow the sport. 'The Spaniards--all Latin people--refer to the passion for bullfighting as el gusano the worm, and it eats at you the rest of your life. El gusano never leaves you." Gorgeous photos.
ms-06.26.14

"The hopefuls are toting their most prized possessions- a vase lovingly wrapped in a towel and riding in a laundry basket on a wagon; a carousel deer with real antlers and a chunk missing from its head; a 4-foot-tall painting of a nude woman; a Winchester rifle; a cart filled with antique dolls. At one point, the sound of shattering china echoes through the set; you can hear people gasp, as everyone looks around nervously, clutching their heirlooms a little more tightly."
ms-06.24.14

"Throughout this article we've made imprecise statements and statements that ought to have had all sorts of qualifications and reservations attached to them; and some of our statements may be flatly false." Alternative Histories, by Miles Klee for Lapham's Quarterly.
jc-06.24.14

"In early May, a product evangelist and tech blogger from San Francisco, Robert Scoble, visited Hogeg. Hogeg showed him Yo and asked for his feedback. 'This is the stupidest, most addictive app I've ever seen in my life,' Scoble told him. Hogeg agreed."
ms-06.24.14

"Well, I don't care if your friend Brad doesn't have to learn the piano. He isn't actually your friend at all. He's a person you think you should like because he's part of the popular crowd, but if you try to glom on to that group, the end result will be tears and humiliation, and you'll question your self-worth while lying in bed at night, creating imaginary torture devices you'd like to use on him."
ms-06.23.14

"Mr Holmes as a character, plus the majority of his characteristics and those of his chums, are decidedly in the public domain." Elementary.
jc-06.23.14

"I was part of their 'Great Minds' tour where you can talk to some of history's geniuses. The nicest one was Ben Franklin, but he had intestinal parasites and spent most of the time on the toilet. Edison didn't want to talk to any of us, although his lab was interesting (no A/C, fyi)."
ms-06.17.14

"Mr. Joyce manages to give the effect of unedited human minds, drifting aimlessly along from one triviality to another, confused and diverted by memory, by sensation and by inhibition, is, in short, perhaps the most faithful X-ray ever taken of the ordinary human consciousness." Edmund Wilson's July 5, 1922 review of Ulysses for TNR. "Mr. Joyce has told the whole truth."
jc-06.16.14

PaperLater is a new service to help take stuff you don't want to read on screen and print it as a newspaper.
dw-06.12.14

"I approached two scouts with a red wool blanket and explained that I was an Eagle Scout, I'd never traded before, but I did happen to have in my possession something uncommon and perhaps extraordinary: the lamest patch in creation. Eyes went wide. Hand unfurled. 'That,' the first one said, 'is pretty bad.' 'Yeah, I've never seen it before,' the second said. 'Okay, I'll trade you.' What do you want for it?"
ms-06.12.14

"Man, do not fuck with the white robots. Are they robots? There's a black one! With asthma. Okay, that's a guy in a suit then. Nobody else is breathing like that though..." Star Wars, First Impressions.
jc-06.11.14

"Throughout your life, there are signals telling you you are a writer. Unless you are not a writer. In which case, there are no signals whatever. At least not signals telling you you are a writer." —Earl Pomerantz.
jc-06.09.14

"The day after Christmas, in 2012, I packed my rented Chevrolet Impala in New Orleans and drove five hours northwest to Shreveport. My plan was to spend a couple of days with Dr. Cuthbert Simpkins, Coltrane biographer and trauma surgeon." An Absolute Truth: On Writing a Life of Coltrane, by Sam Stephenson. Splendid.
jc-06.04.14

"That's how the heart works—it doesn't give a shit about what it's supposed to feel, it just feels. Inconvenient? Inappropriate? Embarrassing? Too bad. Deal." One Giant Cliché, by Steve Edwards for The Rumpus. A lovely and brave essay.
jc-06.03.14

"5- Right now we're only seeing two great lights in the sky...a greater one for day and a lesser one for night? Thinking that maybe we weren't clear in the original briefing. Definitely need more than just two great lights. Need to make this a memorable, high-value experience for our users. Please revisit slides thirteen and fourteen in the deck. Shout with questions."
ms-05.30.14

"You may be the only person who will ever read their sonnets, or their prose poems, or their dystopian novellas. Don't take that privilege lightly." 55 Thoughts for English Teachers, written by one, Nick Ripatrazone.
jc-05.29.14

Nice, our favorite "smutty-metaphor Queen of Lawrence, Kansas," Patricia Lockwood is profiled in this weeks NYT Magazine. "Lockwood finds herself on the verge of literary fame, a product of ill fortune followed by good fortune and the perhaps naive expectations of success that only an outsider can maintain." Follow her here.
jc-05.28.14

"But whereas Cheever, Chekhov, Roth, John Updike, and other literary artists used their keen perceptive abilities in the pursuit of sober realism, Gauguin put his artistry to the purpose of imaginative proto-surrealism."
ms-05.27.14

"From under a tent just left of the small stage, a panel of judges doled out their points, but the real power lay with the moderators onstage, whose task it was to confirm that each new volley was indeed a pun, and not a mere cliche or, worse still, the kind of double entendre whose second meaning is derived from suggestive inflection rather than a legitimate play on words."
ms-05.23.14

"Determined to quit his tired government job, one D.C. office drone saves $25,000 by renting his apartment nightly and secretly sleeping on the office floor." The Secret Life of an Obsessive Airbnb Host.
ms-05.23.14

"This is a story about me and a video game. Although I have always been and expect I always will be a nerd, the events of this story take place when I was approximately 8-10 years old, meaning I had not yet worn away the extra layer of turbo-nerd that little boys of that inclination tend to have at that age." Arcade Story by Steven Frank. Terrific. Via John Gruber.
jc-05.22.14

"I look freaking intense; make it seem like there are flames in my retinas and lasers are shooting out of my pupils. Zoom out. The tree I've been punching falls down and a family of squirrels runs out of it, shrieking and horrified." Notes for the Director of My Kickass Workout Video, by Chas Gillespie.
jc-05.21.14

"Our agency is getting big. That's something to be happy about. But it's something to worry about, too, and I don't mind telling you I'm damned worried." Bill Bernbach wrote to his bosses in 1947.
jc-05.15.14

"If I wanted a capital, I would have typed a capital. I know how to work the shift key." George R.R. Martin explains why he writes on a DOS machine.
dw-05.14.14

"In the 1850s, Leonardo da Vinci was considered no match for giants of Renaissance art like Titian and Raphael, whose works were worth almost ten times as much as the 'Mona Lisa'. It was only in the 20th century that Leonardo's portrait of his patron's wife rocketed to the number-one spot. What propelled it there wasn't a scholarly re-evaluation, but a burglary."
ms-05.14.14

"Alone at night, Charlie reflected on the events of the day- Lucy's fun-spirited request for a rematch, his hopeful trot to the park, the sun glancing down on them like a terrific, smiling lemon drop. Lucy's face seemed to shine at him as she held the ball, seemed to say to him, 'I want to make things right this time'."
ms-05.14.14

"We made small talk in the checkout line at Trader Joe's. You said that you literally could not live without the salsa you were buying. I wish we could talk again. You used 'literally' incorrectly. It really pissed me off. I wish you could literally not live without that salsa, because then I'd take it from you." Missed Connections for Assholes, by Ethan Kuperberg.
jc-05.08.14

"Each month, we will publish a story about a privately held company that has been operating for at least 25 years." The inaugural issue of The Distance, created by our pals at Basecamp. Chicago's Last Tannery, The Horween Leather Company.
jc-05.06.14

"Walter R. Walsh, a world-class marksman who shot clothespins off laundry lines as a boy and went on to become an F.B.I. legend in shootouts with gangsters in the 1930s, an Olympic competitor and a trainer of generations of Marine Corps sharpshooters, died on Tuesday at his home in Arlington, Va. He was 106. Amazing obit.
ms-05.02.14

"On this episode, I finally got to see them. Better yet, to eat all of them, the Greatest Hits of the Glorious career of Paul Bocus--while he sat next to me. It was an amazing, unexpected, never-dreamed of, late in life windfall. Like a lifelong Yankee fan, somehow finding himself throwing the ball around the backyard with Joe DiMaggio." The Man Who Makes me Swoon talks about going to Lyon. I saw this episode and it was fantastic. *Le sigh*
ms-04.29.14

A classic that needs to be revisited periodically. Paul Brians' Commonly Made Suggestions about commonly made errors, and more importantly, Non-Errors, "those usages people keep telling you are wrong but which are actually standard in English." Which is exactly the sort of attitude up with which I will not put.
jc-04.25.14

"But I was able to plot out the locations for every foundry that had been active in New York between 1828 (the earliest records I could find with addresses) to 1909 (see below). All of the buildings have been demolished, and in some cases the entire street has since been erased. But a startling picture still emerged: New York once had a neighborhood for typography."
ms-04.16.14

"For instance, how often do a deciduous tree and a coniferous tree appear in the same painting? We know that 57 percent of paintings contain a deciduous tree and 53 percent of paintings contain a coniferous tree. According to our data set, 20 percent of paintings contain at least one of each." A Statistical Analysis of the Work of the Bob Ross. Via Waxy.
ms-04.15.14

"In the devout Buddhist city of Chiang Mai, gambling, alcohol and greed are strictly frowned upon, and a booze-soaked racetrack is the most popular place in town"
ms-04.08.14

"And I'm hunkered down in my bed with my husband, very pregnant, and we got a call from a dear friend of mine and producer named Jack Nitzsche. Jack Nitzsche called and said you know, Merry, are you busy? I said No, I'm in bed. he says, well, you know, There are some guys in town from England. And they need someone to come and sing a duet with them, but I can't get anybody to do it. Could you come?"
ms-04.08.14

"In 1932, a rising writer from Mississippi found himself amid the bright lights and dry heat of Tinseltown, at the start of what would become a lengthy dalliance with the screenwriting biz. In the wilds of L.A., Faulkner met movie stars, found a bourbon haunt, chased true love, and tried to stay sane in a place that often seemed very far from home." Be sure to check the photos too.
ms-04.04.14

"10. During the lengthy list of side effects, a man, a woman and a dog waking on the beach at sunset shall be shown. When especially lengthy legal copy is being read, have the man throw the dog a Frisbee, or the woman pick up a shell and show it to the man, or the dog barking and the man and the woman giddy with laughter because they love their silly dog and the wonderful new drug they are taking."
ms-04.03.14

"People reacted in different ways, but many people felt like they always had to go through everything. Including me. To this day." Mark All as Read, by Brent Simmons at Inessential. A great piece from the newest member of The Deck, our advertising network serving web, design and creative professionals.
jc-04.02.14

"My guess is if you took all the time that you've spent considering writing a book and translated that into actual writing time, you'd be a quarter of your way into writing that book you're not writing." Rands on How to Write a Book.
jc-04.02.14

"The resulting campaign was, in true Portland fashion, unconventional. Understanding that young locals prefer to discover things instead of being told what to buy, Helm suggested a subtle campaign focused on billboards. 'It had no call to action, no name of the team, no mention of the sport, no URL,' says Helm."
ms-03.31.14

"Their plight eats at him but devours Zeller, who lies awake brooding about the country he fought for - and the one that sent him there to fight. 'In Afghanistan, we learned a phrase - nana watai - which means 'I seek asylum' in Pashto,' says Zeller. 'If you say that to an Afghan, he's duty-bound to protect you. You'd think we'd be big enough to return the favor." The Interpreters We Left Behind. Via MeFi.
ms-03.28.14

"Which brings me, by an admittedly roundabout route, to my favourite political speech - one that embodies all of Sir Ernest Gowers's golden rules, as well as Churchill's. In 1966 a man called Dick Tuck stood as a Democrat in the California Senate elections. When the votes were counted and Tuck realised that he'd been soundly beaten, he conceded defeat with this all-too-human masterpiece of concision: "The people have spoken - the bastards."ms-03.27.14

"We high-school players were pool players, although we would have liked to be billiard players, if for no other reason than that each billiard player was so elite he had a woman besides a wife, but we could rarely finance our aspirations." Related to today's main feature, Norman Maclean on shooting pool with physicist Albert Michelson in 1975. Thanks Duke.
jc-03.26.14

"Toddlers know your weaknesses and will exploit them. They are supervillains-- just give them a volcanic lair and a freaky cat to stroke. The trick is, of course, that toddlers are big-eyed little adorbs-machines. They radiate cuteness waves that wash over you, drawing all the sand on your beaches out to sea until every last defense is down." Via MeFi.
ms-03.26.14

"You know what?" said the Stork. "I don't need this. Things are crazy at work, and I don't have time to babysit you and your fragile psyche." The Fox left angrily, and the Stork immediately went to her computer and blocked him on Facebook." Aesop's Lesser Fables.
ms-03.24.14

"In 1982, a brutal triple homicide shook the city of Waco and soon became one of the most confounding criminal cases in Texas history- one that still haunts the many people who have tried to solve it." The Murders at the Lake. Fascinating long read, a serial worth following.
ms-03.22.14

"It was the greatest art theft in history: 650,000 works looted from Europe by the Nazis, many of which were never recovered. But last November the world learned that German authorities had found a trove of 1,280 paintings, drawings, and prints worth more than a billion dollars in the Munich apartment of a haunted white-haired recluse."
ms-03.21.14

"Some of you may be asking yourselves, is it too soon? Should we give it more time before performing a theatrical reenactment of the events that occurred here?" The First Civil War Reenactment, by Colin Nissan.
jc-03.20.14

"Obligatory victuals, it seems, only to accompany the true object of my excursion-- to suckle the toothsome strawfuls of your wintry Celtic-themed libation as briskly as I can manage, a carnal act performed with full awareness that such pace shall certainly heighten my risk of developing an Arctic cranial ache of epic proportion. No matter, the suffrage will be brief and deserved and pale in compare to the forthcoming Grimaconian rapture."
ms-03.17.14

"If you've force-fed him organic foods, paired meals with assorted wine flights, even gotten him to identify which wines play best off which dishes, make no mistake, I will rain terror down on you so hard!" Give Me Back My Husband! At Some Point! By David Henne.
jc-03.14.14

"I'm sure not even sure I'm eligible for civil liberties. The government's website, Constitution.gov, which is a partisan name, didn't help. It was really complicated, and took four seconds to load on my phone and didn't have single animated GIF."
ms-03.05.14

All of the sudden, flush and hang style, and the difference between truth and Truth. Chicago Style Q&A.
jc-03.04.14

The University of Chicago Library has made the Norman Maclean Papers 1880-1990 available for research. CP hero Maclean was the author of A River Runs Through It (a perfect book which was made into a seriously imperfect movie) and Young Men and Fire, an account of the 1949 Mann Gulch fire that claimed the lives of thirteen forest service smokejumpers.
jc-03.03.14

"SOCRATES: Tell me, Marty, you produce, direct and write many of your films. In other words, you have firm control over all major aspects of your art. Yet you're creating product for Hollywood's large studios, which are, in turn, owned by even larger multinational conglomerates, making you a contributor to the profits and power of a soulless, dehumanizing, commercial force. Tell me, does this make you, ultimately, an artist, a slave or an oligarch?"
ms-03.03.14

"It's time to pay the piper. It just so happens this piper actually smokes a vintage pipe. But make no mistake, I'm going to hit you so hard, the probiotic microorganisms living in your lower colon are going to feel it. Now, take off those really awesome oversized glasses from Tortoise & Blonde so I can punch you, you back-stabbing son of a bitch."
ms-02.27.14

"Well now, I don't know about the whole truth, but I swear to tell some of it." Earl Pomerantz's blog post, A Simple Issue Of Clarity is based on actual events.
jc-02.24.14

"As Wikipedia has grown in size and complexity, so has the task of quality control; today that responsibility falls to a cadre of cleverly programmed robots and 'cyborgs'-- software-assisted volunteers who spend hours patrolling recent edits. Beneath its calm exterior, Wikipedia is a battlezone, and these are its front lines."
ms-02.24.14

"When I think about the mall pet store where I was born, my tiny jet black eyes fill with tears. I will never forget the day my mother — who was also born in a mall pet store, as was her mother before her — looked at me and said, 'Cashew, I heard Netflix is going to start creating original, subscriber-only programming.' I said, 'Mother, what an incredibly complex idea to get across with high-pitched squeaks,' and she said, 'My beloved Cashew! All creatures intuitively understand the concept of high quality on-demand programming.' I promised one day I'd make her proud. Now that day has come." Cashew's Diary.
dw-02.21.14

Katie Baker's review of the New York Times "Vows" section is always eagerly awaited, and this one is a double-month, YOLO Edition of Wedded Blitz!jc-02.18.14

"You should read the book that you see someone on the train reading and trying to hide that they're laughing. You should read the book that you see someone on the train reading and trying to hide that they're crying." Great advice from Janet Potter, 28 Books You Should Read If You Want To.
jc-02.18.14

On this date in 1945, British and U.S. air forces began the 48-hour bombing of Dresden, Germany. Kurt Vonnegut was there when it happened.
jc-02.13.14

"It would make more sense to do laundry after we have sex, except I prefer to lie down with him on sheets surrounded by the alpine-mountain scent of my fabric softener, which is great for children because it's hypoallergenic." I'm a Busy Mom in a TV Commercial for Household Products, by Teddy Wayne.
jc-01.28.14

"You dumb mug, get your mitts off the marbles before I stuff that mud-pipe down your mush --and tell your moll to hand over the mazuma."Twists, Slugs and Roscoes, a glossary of hardboiled slang.
jc-01.21.14

"Almost every day I get asked, 'What's it like being a Senior Search Engine Marketing Specialist?' Everyone is dying to know, and let me tell you, it's everything I ever dreamed it would be." By Christopher Mah.
jc-01.14.14

"One of the strange and slightly creepy pleasures that I get from using Twitter is observing, in real time, the disappearance of words from my stream as they are deleted by their regretful authors." Twitter Regret: First Thought, Worst Thought, by Mark O'Connell.
jc-01.14.14

"Having written Ulysses about the day, I wanted to write this book about the night... Since 1922 my book has been a greater reality for me than reality." On this date in 1941 James Joyce died in Zurich.
jc-01.13.14

Language nerd alert. "A sentence written in passive voice is the shifty desperado who tries to win the gun-fight by shooting the sheriff in the back, stealing his horse, and sneaking out of town." Fear and Loathing of the English Passive, by Geoffret K. Pullman. Hang with it until Section 3, that's where all the fun stuff happens.
jc-01.09.14

"Conan Doyle's other alluring creation was London. Although the author lived only a few months in the capital before moving to the suburbs, he visited the city frequently throughout his life. Victorian London takes on almost the presence of a character in the novels and stories, as fully realize--in all its fogs, back alleys and shadowy quarter-- as Holmes himself."
ms-01.06.14

"In the 1960s, no one wanted bluefin. In the United States, the fish sold for pennies per pound, and it was usually ground up for cat food. Japan fished for it, but few people there liked the bluefin's bloody, fatty meat." How Bluefin Tuna Went From Cat Food to Solid Gold.
ms-01.06.14

"Why am I spending so much time consuming other people's moments?" The Builder's High, by Michael Lopp.
jc-01.03.14

"Sosinski ran to the VHF radio, which was bolted to the ceiling in the small wheelhouse toward the front of the boat, and grabbed the microphone. He switched to channel 16, the distress channel, and at 6:22 a.m., he called for help, his voice shaking: 'Coast Guard, this is the Anna Mary. We've got a man overboard.'"
ms-01.03.14

Since you are really not going to get anything done at work today, you may as well head over spend some time reading Longreads Top 10 Stories of 2013.
ms-12.31.13

"Funny, I don't remember telling her my dream was to one day open a chapter of the Audubon Society. Jesus. You know what would have been nice? Some birdseed. I'm out of saltines and things are starting to get weird in here.
ms-12.27.13

"'We expected them to do the snowbird thing,' said Thorrold. Well, it's December and Mary Lee has, in fact, returned to Florida, but Lydia isn't following that script. Her most recent flurry of pings has come from just off of Newfoundland, 1,000 miles away, in water just a few degrees above freezing."
ms-12.19.13

"You know what I'm really excited about? Pizza Hut now has a pizza with a hot dog in the crust."
ms-12.18.13

"Happy New Year from the Hixon-Palmers! It's been a wild ride on the bleeding edge of social media here in the Hixon-Palmer household! We spent the better part of 2013 strengthening our footprint both online and in our local community, and our family has never been stronger for it. Let us show you how we share!"
ms-12.18.13

The Long List for the tenth Tournament of Books has been announced. Oh boy.
jc-12.13.13

"Packaged in a daily phone call. Lacks originality; rarely advances past remarks on job status and significant others. Consists of 'tisks' and interrogation, most of which can be diverted with white lies.
Pairs with: Career hurdles. Relationships, or lack thereof. Mostly everything."
ms-12.10.13

The Guardian wants your vote for the Bad Sex Award in writing.
ms-12.03.13

"Despite occasional speculation over the years that an optical device somehow enabled Vermeer to paint his pictures, the art-history establishment has remained adamant in its romantic conviction: maybe he was inspired somehow by lens-projected images, but his only exceptional tool for making art was his astounding eye, his otherworldly genius."
ms-12.03.13

Bookmarked this three months ago and finally just read it last night: Jon Krakauer's follow up to Into the Wild, answering the book's primary, unresolved question: "How Chris McCandless Died."
sd-11.26.13

"Because stamps have long been used as a historical record of American culture, the philatelist emphasizes his role as historian, partly because it legitimizes a pastime most people still view as the world's feeblest hobby." The Mail Room, by Sam Sweet for the Paris Review.
jc-11.25.13

"Lithium: That big promotion you've been hoping for will go to the coworker you most despise! Congratulate her, knowing full well that your words won't make her happy. Or maybe they will. Either nobody is happy or everybody is happy but you. Your lucky number today is zero." Antidepressant Horoscopes, by Kristen Steenbeeke and Shawn Laramie.
jc-11.22.13

"The idea of a meal before an execution is compassionate or perverse, depending on your perspective, but it contains an inherently curious paradox: marking the end of a life with the stuff that sustains it seems at once laden with meaning and beside the point." Last Meals, by Brent Cunningham.
jc-11.04.13

"We present here for the first time in digital form all the known manuscripts of Frankenstein, perhaps the most famous and widely reproduced work of British Romanticism." The Frankenstein Notebooks.
ms-11.01.13

"Our hayride is a family-friendly excursion consisting of hot apple cider, group sing-a-longs, and some of the most beautiful autumn foliage upstate New York has to offer. It does not involve a swarm of deranged men flitting through the trees around us and shouting horrible threats while gleefully mutilating themselves with broken bottles."
ms-10.30.13

"Science... f*ck yeah. The cool part about learning science on Facebook is that they use pictures and the words aren't very big and you get to browse Facebook the entire time. Plus, the swearing. You can't swear in school which is bullsh*t."
ms-10.23.13

"There is time enough for everything in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once, but there is not time enough in the year, if you will do two things at a time." Christine Rosen on The Myth of Multitasking. (pdf)
jc-10.21.13

Always a good day when you learn a new word. Chicago, prepare for Graupel.
ms-10.18.13

"He attended the opening night of Manchester's Hacienda nightclub, which he said later became full of 'disfigured disco dancers and goblinesque pork-pie chubbos with carroty-red curls smelling of pickled pig who claimed the Hacienda as their own public toilet'." *Sigh* it could only be Moz.
ms-10.17.13

"I could stop worrying. If fiction didn't have to make sense perhaps life didn't either. It was a revelation." Related to the last, Jonathan Grimwood on TM&M for The Independent's "Book of a Lifetime" series.
jc-10.10.13

"FINALLY, REMEMBER, YOUNG PEOPLE: just because you don't want to pay for health insurance now doesn't mean you'll be able to bit-torrent it for free when you need it later." Via MeFi.
ms-10.09.13

GUEST: I was pushing the button in the subway to ask directions, and the people who answered were very rude to me and unhelpful.
CONCIERGE: Sir, you were pushing the emergency intercom.
GUEST: Well I had to catch my flight!!!
How May We Hate You?
ms-10.09.13

"The music business doesn't give a sh*t about you, or any of us. They will prostitute you for all you are worth, and cleverly make you think its what YOU wanted.. and when you end up in rehab as a result of being prostituted, 'they' will be sunning themselves on their yachts in Antigua, which they bought by selling your body and you will find yourself very alone." Sinead Writes Miley a Letter.
ms-10.03.13

"Since history is doomed to repeat itself, it'll happen again. It's already happened over and over in Chicago, going back for more than 100 years, ever since the Fine Arts Building opened and created the city's first artists' colony." The Migration of the Hipster. Via Gapers Block.
ms-10.03.13

"Collagen, in turn, is necessary to keep your body together, and as scurvy advances joint pain and swelling accompany wounds that do not heal or even re-open and begin to bleed again. (Trapped in the Arctic in 1832, explorer John Ross began to bleed from wounds he'd received decades earlier in the Napoleonic Wars.) Your teeth come loose from your gums, because your body literally can no longer hold itself together.."
ms-10.02.13

"The way I see it, Christopher Robin was feeling lonely and sad last night--maybe his girlfriend just dumped him, maybe he got rejected from the graduate program he was hoping to get in to. He'd probably been drinking, and he started getting wistful for days-gone-by, so he searched us all on Facebook and so-on-and-so-on and there we have it."
ms-10.01.13

"I went on a cleanse once; it was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, I detoxified, I purified, I lost weight. On the other hand, I fell asleep on the highway, fantasized about eating a pigeon, and crapped my pants. I think I'll stick with the whole eating thing."
ms-09.18.13

"The more charged a swear word is the more susceptible it becomes to grammatical transformation. This means that the boundaries between nouns and adjectives and adverbs can all get completely fucked up by swear words, and before you know it the little fuckers are everywhere." Colin Burrow's long, entertaining and profane review of Holy Shit by Melissa Mohr. Fucking great.
jc-09.18.13

"Boil Simmer Reduce," and other important Notes on Design from the mind of Mr. Brendan Dawes.
jc-09.17.13

"I was 21 when I got the call that they liked my packet and I was getting the job. I was throwing out a box of pizza into a dumpster at the moment. The next week I was in a room with Jimmy Kimmel. And his writers. And it was my 22nd birthday. And I felt like throwing up." Zulkey's interview with Jeff Loveness, a writer on Jimmy Kimmel Live!sd-08.23.13

For the next four months @WhitechapelRealTime will tweet Jack the Ripper murders as they happened along with other bits of Victorian life.
dw-08.23.13

"Whom is vocabulary drenched in bourbon, monocles, and mustaches."
dw-08.20.13

"Once, however, we had a company-wide meeting, and I had to let things go unfinished. A co-worker could tell I was antsy about being away and taunted me that there might be typos on the Internet." What It's Really Like To Be A Copy Editor, by Lori Fradkin.
jc-08.19.13

We love ambitious, and big, print projects and Digest, a new magazine from Keir Whitaker and Elliot Jay Stocks certainly qualifies. Can't wait for it to fill the mailbox.
jc-08.16.13

"James Joyce is a good model for punctuation. He keeps it to an absolute minimum. There's no reason to blot the page up with weird little marks. I mean, if you write properly you shouldn't have to punctuate." —Cormac McCarthyjc-08.13.13

"Pardon me? No, sir, no hatchets. Nope, no pickaxes either. OK, listen, people, this isn't really that kind of place. It's always the same complaint: 'Joe, you don't have any of the essential items that every other trading post has. Why don't you have saddles? Or gunpowder? Or basic tools?' Because I have soy chorizo, that's why! Because I have chocolate-covered peanut-butter-filled pretzels! Because I have Parsnip Chips!"
ms-08.07.13

"And we need to say to ourselves that the moment has come when we have to treat every last moving image as reverently and respectfully as the oldest book in the Library of Congress." An essay by Martin Scorsese, Reading the Language of Cinema.
ms-07.29.13

"Yet the nightmare cast its shroud in the guise of a contagion of a deer-in-the-headlights paralysis." Prospero finds the world's worst sentence and offers some help to its author with the assistance of George Orwell. Via Language Log.
jc-07.23.13

Bookmarked for future use, since it's the topic of about half the conversations BB and I have together: Hyphen, En Dash, Em Dash, Minus, and how to use each one.
sd-07.22.13

"I have had my own bloody relationship with Nixon for many years, but I am not worried about it landing me in hell with him. I have already been there with that bastard, and I am a better person for it." HST on RMN.
jc-07.18.13

"There was a time when I attempted to make 'cheers' more interesting by imagining that it referred to the popular sitcom starring Ted Danson, and thus began signing off emails by namechecking various 1980s comedies. However, as novel as this is, in the end signing off with 'The Golden Girls, Ben' or 'Family Ties, Ben' tends to come off a bit unprofessional, especially when dealing with HR."
ms-07.18.13

"So now there are 100 of you left. Nice round number. But not for long! We're at the point in the page where you have to scroll to see more. Of the 100 of you who didn't bounce, five are never going to scroll. Bye!"jc-07.17.13

"If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason." We've been been quoting Deep Thoughts around the office all day, after reading this great NYTJack Handey profile.bb-07.16.13

"You, however, will just want some ideas, please, by EOD Friday, two weeks after our initial Discovery session, which ended with an awkward hug. And we will give you ideas. We will suggest all sorts of creative things to do with your company! You will reject each and every one of them.ms-07.16.13

"But look beneath the technique and what did you find? A sameness, a mental weariness, a mediocrity of ideas. But they could defend every ad on the basis that it obeyed the rules of advertising. It was like worshiping a ritual instead of the God." Bill Bernbach writing to his bosses at Grey, two years before he left to start DDB and change American advertising forever.
jc-07.10.13

"Hey team, sorry for the last-minute meeting. I know there are a ton of distractions going on right now and morale here at Glimmerly has been getting pretty low due to long hours, missed deadlines, lower Manhattan being engulfed by the sea, and Southern California being razed to cinders by wildfire and RPG skirmishes. But I wanted to make sure everybody's totally focused on priority one: getting Glimmerly into the App Store by the first of the month."
ms-07.09.13

The Letter, by Elon Green. A fine, long piece on the editorial history of The New Yorker.
jc-07.08.13

"I noticed that in your fitness philosophy that you blog about, you tell me you want me to be my best everyday. If I were to subscribe to your RSS though, I was wondering if I could ever get a day off?" An Open Letter to #fitgirls, by Emma Froggatt.
jc-07.08.13

"Anatomy of a Hack: How crackers ransack passwords like qeadzcwrsfxv1331."
ms-06.27.13

I Wish That We Could Both Be There, by William Dettloff for TMN. A brilliant piece using narrative and statistics to examine an accident from 1974, and how it has echoed through the last 40 years.
jc-06.26.13

"Brandon Bollig skated expectantly toward the Zamboni entrance, searching for his loved ones the way a child leaving school scans the parking lot for his parents." Katie Baker on last night.
jc-06.25.13

"Zozam managed five chilies. The winner, Namlui Rongmei, finished 14. He's crouched on the floor, glassy-eyed. I see him reach for the hem of the doctor's white coat. A man behind me squats in the shrubbery, checking his smartphone while he waits waits for the vomiting to commence..
ms-06.18.13

"It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed. Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer." So begins Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine.jc-06.14.13

"To characterize the similarities and differences between 'geek' and 'nerd,' maybe we can find the other words that tend to keep them company, and see if these linguistic companions support my point of view?"
jc-06.13.13

"S.81, a bill to allow asylum for persecuted democracy activists. Senator Kelly Ayotte invokes Rule 212, which sends the bill back to committee for review, then to every other Senate committee, then to every other political body within 3,000 miles. The bill is currently under review by the student council of Santa Rosa High School in the Dominican Republic."
ms-06.12.13

"'If you're reading this letter, it means I've passed on to the other side, into the valley of perpetual brightness,' your light bulb will tell you," The Internet of Actual Things, by Giles Turnbull.
jc-06.12.13

People who like this sort of thing will find it exactly the sort of thing they like. This long, insightful LRB article by Michael Wood on the four translations of Michael Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita has me jacked to read the book again. Sympathy For the Devil.
jc-06.07.13

"Sure, I'd cleared my name after the police had pegged me for pocketing a peck of pickled peppers, but ever since my previous partner got plugged poking his peepers into one too many private places, the only thing I've been interested in pickling my liver."
ms-06.07.13

Sprint for Glory by Charles Graeber. Across the USA on an outlaw attempt to break the speed record in an M5. Via @TMN.
jc-06.05.13

"The one that caught my eye first was the one in the plaid green two-piece. She was a chunky kid, with a good tan and a sweet broad soft-looking can with those two crescents of white just under it, where the sun never seems to hit, at the top of the backs of her legs." Tangentially related to a Twitter conversation, John Updike's "A&P".jc-06.05.13

"Since no one can see the future, I will answer by presenting twenty possible scenarios, which, admittedly, vary in their likelihood. Nevertheless, I feel it is best to try to be thorough so that at least one of the scenarios may prove true in five years. Most of the scenarios are positive, but a few negative scenarios are included for balance. Please note that during previous performance reviews I have been repeatedly told that I need to 'think outside the box'."
ms-06.03.13

A look at the book La Tacopedia: Enciclopedia Del Taco, a reference for all things taco. Though why you would ever need consider one that isn't Sonoran style is beyond me.
sd-05.30.13

"tweetthink - The impulse you have, after naturally saying something funny in conversation, to craft that statement into a social media post." Updates to the Newspeak Dictionary 2013.
ms-05.30.13

"I started at noon and I was done by 1pm. I'd expected that maybe a hundred nerds would read it and enjoy it, and that some people would have had a fun lunch hour because of me. Instead, it changed the trajectory of my life. By the time I went home at five it'd had a quarter-of-a-million readers, a week later I had a manager, and a week after that I had a contract with Warner Brothers. They brought me on to write a treatment, and then a screenplay based on that treatment."
jc-05.28.13

"I thought that the very concept of a man who was kidnapped by aliens was truly unbelievable and a tad ludicrous." Lone Star Statements, by Matthew Baldwin. A compilation of one-star Amazon reviews of great books.
jc-05.17.13

"So many times as I walk the city, I can feel the quiet, as if it reaches from down into the soil, up into the sky. One night at my desk, I hear, with what seems like great violence, the noise of a car driving at a normal speed down Pragerstrasse, the street outside my apartment, followed by the noise of another. It is night and a weekday, and so unusual, it is almost like thunder." Everything in This City Must, by Alexander Chee.
jc-05.14.13

"The hippo who tried to kill me wasn't a stranger - he and I had met before a number of times."
ms-05.14.13

"I remember asking Christiane Kubrick what her husband was looking for during those ever lengthening gaps between films. She said, 'The magical moment of falling in love with a story.' I know that feeling well." Zulkey's interview with Jon Ronson, author of Them: Adventures with Extremists and The Men Who Stare at Goats, and director of Stanley Kubrick's Boxes.
sd-05.13.13

"The Good Fairy Fairfuck helps him conquer his addiction to self-abuse, so he can embrace the joys of holy matrimony with his betrothed, the Princess Shovituppa." Melissa Mohr knows where all the dirtiest words come from.
jc-05.13.13

"Disappearing over the horizon at such speed as to leave a diminishing jet trail along its path, the Rocket Sled soon brought Mr. Coyote abreast of his prey. At that moment the animal he was pursuing veered sharply to the right. Mr. Coyote vigorously attempted to follow this maneuver but was unable to, due to poorly designed steering on the Rocket Sled..." An absolute classic, Ian Frazier's Wile E. Coyote, Plaintiff v. Acme Company, Defendant.
jc-05.09.13

So That If I Died It Mattered, by Jon Sands. Beautiful and honest and heart-breaking. Read this if you are a mother, or if you have one.
jc-05.07.13

"Changing something from 'draft' to 'published' is like climbing a hill and looking down. The change in perspective makes certain things obvious." Elegy for the Text Box, by Paul Ford.
jc-05.07.13

"A poster going by the screennames 'TimeTravel_0' and 'John Titor' on a variety of message boards, beginning with the forum at the Time Travel Institute, claimed he was a soldier sent from 2036, the year the computer virus wiped the world." The Mystery of John Titor, by Rick Paulas.
jc-05.07.13

"Here, I mean, it's a movie. Which, by definition, is not real. Despite that challenging obstacle, the actors, with their swearing, their crappy furniture, their regular speech patterns, and their crying, they're trying to convince me that it is!" Earl Pomerantz is jaded about movies (except when he's not)jc-05.06.13

A classic that needs to be revisited periodically. Paul Brians' Commonly Made Suggestions about commonly made errors, and more importantly, Non-Errors, "those usages people keep telling you are wrong but which are actually standard in English." Which is exactly the sort of attitude up with which I will not put.
jc-05.02.13

"Because we didn't know what we were doing, we simply did whatever we had to do to make things work." Good advice from Jason Fried, The Importance of Quick and Dirty. I am a big proponent of not knowing what you're doing, in fact that's pretty much our entire business plan.
jc-05.02.13

"It was one of countless hockey games we attended over the years, and certainly not the first between the two Original Six teams representing his home state of Michigan and the city he adopted and loved all out of proportion, Chicago." James Hughes on his father and hockey. Long and just lovely, with a fabulous photo of Buck Russell at Center Ice of the Chicago Stadium in 1989. Highly recommended.
jc-05.01.13

"One opalescent night in childhood we played on our silver-frozen lake. A filthy boy in ragged skates swung his stick as I dove. Catching soft pink tissue inside my mouth, he tore a lone bicuspid free and shot it into the moonlit sky, enamel flashing overhead as I lay supine before the goal." Nabokov Wins One for the Islanders, by Andrea Pitzer.
jc-05.01.13

"I haven't ever seen so many people staring at their phones like idiots,' he said, observing what I might have if I'd been looking up from my phone. 'They actually believe this stuff is worthwhile."
ms-04.29.13

"You spend the first forty years of your life trying to get in this ----ing business, and the next forty years trying to get out. And then when you're making the bread, who needs it?" Saturday at Lee ----ing Marvin's, by Roger Ebert.
jc-04.29.13

"The most common of the genus ellipses, the Actual Ellipsis (AE) [not to be confused with '..,' the Moron's Ellipses (ME)] finds regular use in correspondence meant to suggest a sense of impending doom..." A Field Guide to Common Punctuation, by Peter K..
jc-04.25.13

"I use fresh Rocky Mountain Spring Water from the break room water cooler for my PowerPoint Pilsner. I actually grow my own hops here, sustainably, on this Chia Pet in the sunny corner of my cubicle. My carbon footprint is like, negative."
ms-04.24.13

"Even more insidious and common is in terms of, a fine phrase if you are talking about mathematical equations or economic functions in which specific "terms" are defined, but it is just loose and woolly when you say things like "in terms of culture," for which there are simply no clear terms." A great interview by Mark Danner with Robert Silvers, founding editor of the New York Review of Books.
jc-04.24.13

"Ask an artist about the things they make, and you'll get the strangest answers. They are the closest to that work and sometimes, as a result, the furthest from it as well. They are not objective observers and so they do not always have reason, but they have hope and that is reason enough to ask them." Ben Greenman learns about his own book from other people's paintings. Brilliant.
jc-04.22.13

"Books are ordered with an eye to their level of artistry, their long-term impact, and the extent to which they capture Chicago." Geoffrey Johnson's Top 40 Chicago Novels and another five from Book Riot.
jc-04.16.13

Jay Fanelli is a failure and we like him that way. Thanks for the shout.
jc-04.15.13

A couple of years ago, Australian illustrator James Gulliver Hancock moved to New York City and, in an effort to "own" his new home in his unique way, set out to draw every single building in town.
ab-04.15.13

"Once you've selected your Jingle Template, we will request that you provide us with the lyrical content you would like for Fred to incorporate into the finished product. We will not proceed without you submitting your desired lyrics. We will never use the lyrics you provide."
ms-04.11.13

With all the high-stakes proofreading and press-checking we do around here, I routinely have nightmares about embarrassing typos sneaking into Field Notes, but my imagination will never top this.
bb-04.09.13

I've only just discovered The Paris Review, but it's celebrating its 60th year. I'd learned from another post that if you're creative and feeling a bit stuck, a great thing to do is read a biography or autobiography. The Paris Review has interviews with authors over seven decades. You can search by decade or by author. Prepare to be unstuck.
ab-04.09.13

That's Different "AKA: Signs That You're Getting Older - One of A Series - Unless You Hate It Or I Hate It In Which Case It's 'One and Out', (which would have made it my longest post title ever but it isn't, because I moved it down to the body of the post and used 'That's Different' instead which, as a title, would tie for my second shortest.) By Earl Pomerantz.
jc-04.08.13

"Early on in the investigation, a lawyer from a Senate subcommittee investigating corruption in boxing came to interview Maffia and asked him if Don King was tied to organized crime. Hauser, who was in the room as Maffia's legal adviser, told the lawyer, 'You don't understand. Don King is organized crime.'" Jay Caspian Kang on Don King for Grantland.
jc-04.06.13

"As the lights went down one last time, Ebert would have loved it if all those people sitting in the dark and hoping for the best understood that his approach to movies was big enough, openhearted enough to embrace far more than the movies he'd loved all his life."
ms-04.04.13

"But in addition to its magnificent legacy in the history of letter writing, the comma gives us pause to build our anticipation or steel ourselves in preparation." The Comma From Which My Heart Hangs, by Benjamin Samuel. Bravo sir, bravo.
jc-04.04.13

In honor of opening day here in Chicago today, James Earl Jones reads Casey at the Bat.
ms-04.01.13

"James the Less agrees with Jesus and says that Jesus's entry into Jerusalem while riding a donkey and wearing a hoodie got him major cred with twenty-something startup CEOs." Official Meeting Minutes From the Last Supper.
ms-03.29.13

"Her work is characterized by a keen eye for the most flattering angle, the frequent inclusion of an ever-changing cast of BFFs and stunning repetition." Selfies of Becky Jones: A Retrospective, by Sarah Anders.
jc-03.25.13

"This has to be the biggest upset in the nine years of the Tournament. We're talking NC State over Phi Slama Jama Houston, or Buster Douglas taking down Mike Tyson, or AfterMASH getting a second season." John Warner on today's last Quarterfinal Match in the ToB.
jc-03.22.13

"The idea of crowd-sourcing personal decisions did not occur to Merrill until after he disclosed to shareholders... that he had moved in with his then-girlfriend. One shareholder promptly complained that the decision, which could easily impact Merrill's creative output, constituted a unilateral management maneuver that put investor capital at risk." How One Man Turned Himself Into a Publicly Owned Company, by Rob Walker.
jc-03.21.13

Michael Lopp knows you are a beautiful snowflake, despite what it says on your business card. Titles are Toxic.
jc-03.19.13

Things are getting serious now. The Quarterfinals have begun in the The Morning News Tournament of Books. Today pits John Green's The Fault in our Stars against Adam Johnson's The Orphan Master's Son.jc-03.19.13

"You chose the Fire Pit Bacon Burger, and she chose the Chicken Quesadilla Grande, and in that moment, all was perfect. Remember that, my friend. When it was go time, you brought her to the Neighborhood. And you ate good in the Neighborhood. You ate good, damn it."
ms-03.11.13

"Both of these were so good. As I type this out I'm realizing that I haven't quite made up my mind. Did I just sit down and start writing, hoping that I'd figure it out? Maybe. Was this maybe not the greatest plan? Maybe not. And what if I don't figure it out? Can this end in a tie? Do we go to overtime?" Charles Yu has to decide betweeen Chris Ware's Building Stories and Alice Munro's Dear Life in today's Opening Round Match of the Tournament of Books.
jc-03.11.13

"As it turned out, Lucas had already done the cataloging. His company maintained a database called the Holocron, named after a crystal cube powered by the Force. The real-world Holocron lists 17,000 characters in the Star Wars universe inhabiting several thousand planets over a span of more than 20,000 years." How Disney Bought Lucasfilm.
ms-03.08.13

"All of these books work as fully realized narratives by virtue of how the authors forged text and imagery, making for truly singular works." Buzz Poole on illustrated books.
jc-03.06.13

The Morning News Tournament of Books kicks off this morning with a three book "play-in" for the final spot on the brackets and it's off to a fine start. First round matches start on Thursday.
jc-03.04.13

"In his first week, he pulled aside a colleague to ask a question: How hard it is for a nonemployee to enter the building?" The story of an ongoing, month-long 23 year old game of tag between four friends. Likely already optioned as a film for Vince Vaughn to star in.
sd-03.01.13

"...tasteful covers rarely stand out on the shelves and from a marketing perspective there isn't anything necessarily wrong with something being dissonant."
You'll Never Get Anywhere Like That, Or a Few Thoughts on the Cover Design of The Bell Jar, by Dan Wagstaff.
jc-02.27.13

"As social chair of my fraternity, AXA, I not only increased the attendance of our weekly No Pants Parties by 30%, I successfully persuaded the Dartmouth Disciplinary Council to permit AXA to conduct internal reviews of alleged incidents of sexual harassment and bullying. I am a problem solver." John Ortved would like to be Pope.
jc-02.25.13

Really great long read of the day, Kevin Pang's piece on Chicago chef Curtis Duffy, His Saving Grace.
ms-02.14.13

"The fact is that most of the people in this world will never know what the weather in February here feels like. We own that here. We're proud of it. It's what seems to set us apart." February in Chicago. Via GB.
ms-02.13.13

While the article itself is a great, detailed breakdown of The Battle of Hoth, commenter JordanViray completely steals the show.
ms-02.13.13

"Good morning, and welcome to Advanced English Literature— I'm Professor Anglosoundingname. As you can see, I have a mane of silver hair and wear a corduroy blazer with leather elbow patches..." I'm an English Professor In a Movie, by Teddy Wayne.
jc-02.07.13

The Rise of Bounding Asterisks (*ahem*) in Lieu of Italicization for Styling Text, by John Gruber.
jc-02.07.13

"Coachella is being headlined by Blur, Wu-Tang Clan, Dinosaur Jr, and Moby." New York's Carl Swanson discusses the New Museum's belief that it's been 1993 for the past twenty years. "Are We Still Living in 1993?"
sd-02.06.13

"I will make at least one effort per month to engage my direct reports on a more personal level, whether that means talking about sports, asking about their children, or telling them about my marital problems. The topic is not important, so long as I have demonstrated that I am not too proud to stoop down to their level for a few seconds."
ms-01.25.13

This Pictorial Atlas is a collection of over 225 illustrations depicting all the major representations of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey as can be found in classical antiquity.
dw-01.22.13

"I'd wait for the 4:15 screening in theater fifteen, presented in 2D Action Focus format. It has a running time of 70 minutes with no dwarf songs..." An Unexpected Screening Format Decision, by Martin Azevedo.
jc-01.22.13

"I must confess to being rather blindsided by the end of our relationship. It seems Captain Von Trapp and I misunderstood each other. I assumed he was looking for a wife of taste and sophistication, who was a dead ringer for Tippi Hedren; instead he wanted to marry a curtain-wearing religious fanatic who shouts every word she says."
ms-01.15.13

"He plays a schmaltzy video where Portuguese children teach adults to use Windows 8 accompanied by a hyperloud xylophone soundtrack that slices through my hangover like cheesewire though lukewarm gouda."
ms-01.15.13

"And yet today, we are being explicitly invited to consider everything as being a little dollop from one giant homogenous lump of 'contemporary culture', an exercise in flattening and blending that takes away the delight of discovery." What Things Magazine is thinking here, at the end of the year. Amen.
jc-12.21.12

"Or check this out: an .rtf containing the text of the original 42-line Gutenberg Bible, elegantly typeset in MS Courier New. I have a couple thousand other copies of the file on an external hard drive, but I'll happily delete them to make this one rarer if you like."
ms-12.06.12

"Disappearing over the horizon at such speed as to leave a diminishing jet trail along its path, the Rocket Sled soon brought Mr. Coyote abreast of his prey. At that moment the animal he was pursuing veered sharply to the right. Mr. Coyote vigorously attempted to follow this maneuver but was unable to, due to poorly designed steering on the Rocket Sled..." Related to the last, an absolute classic, Ian Frazier's Wile E. Coyote, Plaintiff v. Acme Company, Defendant.
jc-11.27.12

"And ideally, you'll grant me access to your bedroom so I can be a witness to the moment your baby is conceived." Artisanal Baby Naming, by Bob Powers.
jc-11.27.12

Relink. "We found out that my hooker with a heart of gold had spent some time the previous night doing what many of us do while waiting for a john to return from a smoke break: editing photos on facebook." Sledgehammer and Whore, a great story by a screenwriter named Josh.
jc-11.26.12

"That's a gross exaggeration. Henry James adored me; incidentally, many consider him the paradigm of subtlety; he was certainly more subtle than that Vonnegut fellow." Interview with a semicolon.
ms-11.21.12

"Venice is certifiably one of the last places on earth where you'd think of walking through a restaurant door and ordering a turkey dinner on the fourth Thursday in November. But that kind of logic is weak beer to my mother." Rosecrans Baldwin's Thanksgiving in Venice.
jc-11.14.12

"Think of it as a well-meaning doff of a roundel-sized hat - one, mind you, that has nothing to do with Transport for London or the office of the Mayor of London." 150 Great Things About the Underground.
ms-11.12.12

"I really wanted to be extremely open-minded about this novel. Obviously because we take our Classic Trash deathly seriously, but also because people who are super into Atlas Shrugged are the sort of people who send nasty emails about how you are a parasitic Communist who couldn't make a better kind of steel to save your life." Who Is John Galt's Chiropractor? by Nicole Cliffe. Terrific.
jc-11.09.12

Joe Queenan's "My 6,128 Favorite Books," an excerpt in the WSJ from his new book about the joys and perils of being a reader, One for the Books.
sd-10.30.12

"I am going to own up in advance to all the wickedness I have done, and if any congressional committee is disposed to prowl around my biography in the hope of discovering any dark and deadly deed that I have secreted, why—let it prowl." Campaign Promises from Mark Twain.
jc-10.30.12

Did you ever have one of those weeks where you have a bunch of stuff to do and you have no problem starting anything but then after a little while, either because you're unhappy with the progress you have made or because you suddenly find it difficult to focus on the work at hand, you become distracted and then you have to start all over, but now that project doesn't seems so attractive anymore so you rummage around and pick up another bit of work only to find that your enthusiasm, which at first seemed boundless, has disappeared right in the middle of
jc-10.30.12

"This morning over breakfast S. asked me why I looked so glum. 'Because,' I said, 'everything that exists is born for no reason, carries on living through weakness, and dies by accident. 'Jesus,' S. said. 'Aren't you ever off the clock?'
Jean-Paul Sarte's Blog.
ms-10.30.12

God's Little Acre of Diamonds: Observations On Travel Ball in Cobb County, Georgia. Take the Field, Boys, by Stella A.
jc-10.24.12

"Highlighting forgotten, neglected, abandoned, forsaken, unrecognized, unacknowledged, overshadowed, out-of-fashion, under-translated writers. Has no one read your books? You are in good company." Writers No One Reads from Will Schofield.
jc-10.23.12

Congrats to FotA and former CP Guest Editor, Jami Attenberg, for the big publication day of her new novel, The Middlesteins. Not too shabby with the gushing Franzen blurb there, Jami.
sd-10.23.12

Related to the last. A Drive into the Gap by Kevin Guilfoile from Field Notes Brand Books. A true story about fathers and sons, baseball and memory, and the improbable journey of a bat from one of the most iconic moments in the history of the game to the bedroom of a 12-year-old boy.
jc-10.17.12

"...as I fanned through the pages, this little piece of pink and orange cardboard, with a string attached, popped out of the book and fluttered to the carpet." Kevin Guilfoile makes a sweet find. The Secret Of Pitcher Pollock, at ChicagoSide and also in TimeOut Chicago this week.
jc-10.17.12

Speaking of John "The Biblioracle" Warner, he writes, "That one's my favorite. I'm never going to be invited to the Top 10 table with Patterson, Rowling, and Grisham, but at 4,609, if the authors of the world are meeting at a mid-sized arena, I can at least get an invite." Putting on Clean Underwear Before You Leave the House.
jc-10.15.12

Reading Is in the Air, the Bilblioracle is live today to 2pm ET. Tell him the last five books you've read and he'll tell you what to read next.
jc-10.15.12

"Most noticeably, the magazine dispenses with the tone that the critic Alexander Cockburn described as 'cookbook pastoral'-- the sense that the ideal dinner is a sit-down for 16 with candlelight and hydrangea and unbridled toasting, a pseudo-Mediterranean hedonism that precludes wailing toddlers and mismatched silverware." A look at the man behind Cook's Illustrated.
ms-10.15.12

"The potatoes looked amazing fading off into the blur of a shallow focal range that ends at the saturated greens and yellows of herbs, and cornbread, and lemon garnish on the left just below where the sunset creates the lens flare that bounces off your icy bottle of beer." Pleased to Meet the Facebook Version of You.
ms-10.12.12

"Go back five years, ten, fifty and reconsider how dusty, tinted, scratched, warped the lens through which these events will be considered." —Jan Chipchase, Your Memories Laid Bare. Just brilliant.
jc-10.12.12

"I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language. Because of them I rode with Don Quixote and danced with Anna Karenina at a ball in St. Petersburg and lassoed a steer in Lonesome Dove and had nightmares about slavery in Beloved and walked the streets of Dublin in Ulysses and made up a hundred stories in The Arabian Nights and saw my mother killed by a baseball in A Prayer for Owen Meany." Book-Banners are Invariably Idiots.
ms-10.05.12

"A baby then, now a middle-aged man, Ferry would go on to gain weight, change his name to the more ethnic-sounding Fieri, frost the tips of his hair blond, wear his sunglasses on the back of his head, become a Food Network star and open, at the beginning of September, Guy's American Kitchen and Bar in Times Square, a restaurant that would be indicted for crimes against humanity, if only that crime fell within Department of Health's purview." Trashed.
ms-10.04.12

"Others, however, hold that it refers to the haze in the air that resulted from Indian prairie fires—fires that were lit predominantly in these early weeks of autumn." Shades of Red: On Indian Summer, by Maria Konnikova. Via Kirstin Butler.
jc-10.02.12

"That affection and frequency and quality of sexual relations dropped precipitously and quite nearly to zero following the 'nearly unforgiveable betrayal/horrible, but honest mistake' is to expected, the normal course following a relationship's near collapse, as is the increase in negative measurements like amount of shouting, and overall alcohol intake." John Warner wants to know if We Are Better Off Than We Were Four Years Ago? Great.
jc-09.27.12

"Not that they didn't try to produce some interesting twists. There was the mid-season ratings push with the episode about finally catching Osama Bin Laden--but even that felt forced and poorly handled. Where was the MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner? Where were the fighter jets?" Mid-Season Review of Hit Television Series American Election 2012.
ms-09.27.12

The Awl's Classic Trash. Nicole Cliffe on Stranger In A Strange Land.Can You Grok That?jc-09.26.12

"We won't use it in the 'Weddings/Celebrations' section, because that would be crass, even though our readers know every article could accurately conclude with the happy couple going to take part in the very act depicted by the word we have now resolved to print on occasion." The New York Times Announces an Editorial Policy Change, by Sarah Rosenshine
jc-09.24.12

"He wheezed with laughter. He laughed at his own jokes. He was practical. He was shy. He amused himself, during workshops, by doodling." An essay on what Kurt Vonnegut was like as a teacher at the Writers' Workshop.
sd-09.18.12

"A logo exploration that includes at least five unique logo designs. These will consist of differently sized circles and in one case the words will be rotated to a landscape rather than a portrait view. If you want your actual company name below the logo, that will be part of round two and will require additional dollars and conceptual exploration time." A Candid Proposal from an Advertising Firm's Creative Director.
ms-09.17.12

Zulkey's interview with Cheryl Strayed, the author and advice columnist whose book, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, relaunched Oprah's Book Club.
sd-09.14.12

Death of a Pressman, by Fritz Swanson. A beautiful appreciation of a tradesman and his trade.
jc-09.12.12

"No, but five minutes ago she posted a photo of her wearing green roller skates on Instagram. Is this what they look like?" Wikipedia handed his dad the phone. "Yes, except they don't look old and blurry like that."
"That's just the filter she's using," Leroy said. "They don't really look like that." Wikipedia Brown.
ms-09.11.12

"As the title of this filter suggests, you are tirelessly optimistic. Your images are the pictorial equivalent of lyrics to a Sheryl Crow song, which goes something like, 'Outside of a car wash/There's my silver Honda Civic/Here are my feet on green grass/I got a new haircut!" Your Instagram Horoscope.
ms-09.07.12

"You are currently subscribed to Casual Romantic And Sexual Relationship That Is Becoming Serious. You are requesting to modify our relationship, is that correct?" Click Here to Unsubscribe From This Relationship, by Sarah Pavis.
jc-09.05.12

"Lists maybe the simplest way to organize-- we have our to-do lists --but they do so much more. They can tell a story, unveil personal dramas and influence history." Ode to the List.
ms-09.04.12

"I understand, because of cellphones, the three-finger-curled-thumb-up-pinkie-down 'Call me' has generally replaced it. But I had no idea the fist 'Call me' was now persona non grata in polite society." Leading The Trend, by Earl Pomerantz.
jc-08.29.12

Speaking of Roberto and chasing ghosts, KG's A Drive into the Gap is available. Your Dad needs one. You need one. The whole darn Little League team needs one.
jc-08.28.12

Related to the last and a classic that needs to be revisited periodically. Paul Brians' Commonly Made Suggestions about commonly made errors, and more importantly, Non-Errors, "those usages people keep telling you are wrong but which are actually standard in English." Which is exactly the sort of attitude up with which I will not put.
jc-08.28.12

"Boys, can you make a website?" Z gets The Great Discontent treatment. I love stories about how people got where they are and where they're going next, and this is a good one.
jc-08.28.12

As an urban gardener, I totally feel Mike's frustration with thieving squirrels. Many a morning I have awoken to half-eaten tomatoes jalapenos and bell peppers scattered on the deck. Not to mention the red flower body parts savagely strewn about, never the yellow or orange, just the red flowers. That said, I'm not sure I am ready to take revenge the way he did.
ms-08.17.12

"She was a doozy of a dame, with dangerous eyes like blue screens of death and a dark umber HP Pavilion laptop with a 640 GB hard drive she'd dropped off the day before. I'd taken her case at the recommendation of her father, the landlord, on account of my being two months behind on the rent." Raymond Chandler's The Man Who Repaired Laptops.
ms-08.13.12

"Q: When did you lose your faith in humanity?
A: I work at a casino. About six years ago a guy keeled over on the smoking patio. There were two women with him. One ran into the casino to get help, but the other one who was still out there—she stole his chips."
jc-08.08.12

"She had sort of oaky hair that the sun and salt had bleached, done up in a bun that was unravelling, and a kind of prim face. Walking into the A & P with your straps down, I suppose it's the only kind of face you can have." Apropos of nothing except the weather, "A&P" by John Updike.
jc-08.06.12

"How can a question be answered that asks a lifetime of questions?" Philip Connors' brilliant essay on Maclean is mandatory reading if you're a devoted fan, and a great place to start if you're not one, yet.
jc-08.02.12

"A new fire often looks beautiful, first a wisp of white like a feather, a single snag puffing a little finger of smoke in the air. I see it before it has a name. Like Adam with an animal before him..." A Talent for Sloth, by Philip Conners.
jc-08.02.12

"A new fire often looks beautiful, first a wisp of white like a feather, a single snag puffing a little finger of smoke in the air. I see it before it has a name. Like Adam with an animal before him..." A Talent for Sloth, by Philip Conners.
jc-08.02.12

"When I was young, a teacher had forbidden me to say 'more perfect' because she said if a thing is perfect it can't be more so. But by now I had seen enough of life to have regained my confidence in it." CP hero Norman Maclean died on this date in 1990.
jc-08.02.12

"Campaign finance regulations used to place a cap on individual contributions, and the identity of each donor had to be logged with the FEC--so even He-Who-Must-Not- Be-Named had to be, you know, named. It was public information, for example, that Tom Marvolo Riddle contributed the maximum-allowed $5,000 to John McCain's '08 presidential run."
ms-07.31.12

A Sign Set for Any College Town, by Larry Buchanan, from his series "Graphic Dispatches from a Recent College Grad Still Living in a College Town."
jc-07.23.12

"The semicolon keeps the words above water." So you know, how to use semicolons, by Mary Norris.
jc-07.19.12

A very low-fi recording of something that will appeal only to a small group of people: an edition of Live from Prairie Lights with readings from the The Burg: A Writer's Diner, a new collection of personal essays about Iowa City's iconic Hamburg Inn. Not sure if there are any mentions of the pie shakes.
sd-07.19.12

"Most words are rare, and rare words occur almost entirely in print." On Word Learning, Incidentally, by Jessica Love. A fascinating piece on how we use context to unravel meaning. Not a bit cumbrous
jc-07.17.12

"It'd be nice to think that every single ad award was a clear, neutral judgement of pure quality, but if you believe that you probably still write letters to Santa." Great read by Ben Kay about the brouhaha at Cannes: "Tactical Voting at Cannes: Storm in a Rose Glass."
sd-06.26.12

"There's almost never a time when every decision you make is correct and every step is in the right direction. Life, like bowling, is full of complicating factors, unpredictable variables, plenty of times when there is no right answer." The Most Amazing Bowling Story Ever. Via MeFi.
ms-06.25.12

"Mr. Joyce manages to give the effect of unedited human minds, drifting aimlessly along from one triviality to another, confused and diverted by memory, by sensation and by inhibition, is, in short, perhaps the most faithful X-ray ever taken of the ordinary human consciousness." Edmund Wilson's July 5, 1922 review of Ulysses for TNR. "Mr. Joyce has told the whole truth."
jc-06.16.12

"...for all its renown and notoriety, it is a book that few have read and even fewer comprehend. To rectify this, BBC News Online presents an irreverent simple chapter-by-chapter guide to the key events, characters and Homeric parallels." A cheat's guide to Ulysses.jc-06.16.12

"...here's the upsetting punch line: intelligence seems to make things worse." Interesting read of the day, all about how more fancy book learnin' often results in higher susceptibility to cognitive bias. Or in other words: "Why Smart People Are Stupid."
sd-06.15.12

"I was very flattered when Joyce dropped the 'Mister.' Everybody was 'Mister.' There were no Christian names, no first names. The nearest you would get to friendly name was to drop the 'Mister.' I was never 'Sam.' I was always 'Beckett' at the best. We'd drink in any old pub or cafe." This Recording in which Samuel Beckett didn't intend to be a writerjc-06.15.12

"When the interview was over, one of the girl's cousins said to him, gently, 'I'm sorry about what's happening to your newspaper.'" An interesting/difficult read about the recent gutting of the Times-Picayune.
sd-06.13.12

"We would especially like to thank some of our key corporate partners who continue tossing us their spare change, not because they care about the arts, but because somebody there feels bad for us and the life choices we made." An Honest Theatrical Playbill, by Daniel Falk.
jc-06.13.12

"It appears now that Kurniawan may have sold millions of dollars' worth of counterfeit wines and scammed some of the world's biggest collectors. It is potentially the largest case of wine fraud in history and may have left the market for rare and old wines irredeemably corrupted." Today's long read, A Vintage Crime.
ms-06.12.12

The history of a Soviet relic in Budapest, from the birth of the legend that spawned it, to the post-Communism tear down: "Captain Ostapenko's Statue."
sd-06.11.12

Relink. "The official swatch of desert tan is housed in Franconia, Va., just outside Washington's beltway, in a warehouse filled with the rest of the federal government's certified color chips."
Americhrome, by Graham T. Beck for The Morning News. fab.
jc-06.05.12

"I do not complain of her coming late and going early; on the contrary, I wish she had come later and gone earlier." GBS had a bad night at the opera.
jc-05.31.12

Long read for the day: The Verge's "Scamworld," about the people behind internet marketing schemes.
sd-05.30.12

"People who know the rules know what is possible and what is impossible. You do not and you should not. The rules of what is possible and impossible were made by people who have not tested the bounds of possible by going beyond them - and you can." Neil Gaiman's graduation speech to the University of Arts class of 2012.
ms-05.29.12

"Here, the cover is a protector of the signatures and the binding. It allows the books to fly in and out of the stacks a thousand times, and still be usable. In the digital world, our books are protected by ubiquity. They are everywhere and nowhere." From Hack the Cover, by Craig Mod. Aces.
jc-05.24.12

"In an airy studio on a high floor of the London College of Fashion, featuring a long conference table, white walls, and a view to an adjoining patio - where, a sign warns, bees are being kept - the hues you will see in two years are being divined by a pan-European group of colorists." Sneaking Into Pantone HQ. Via MeFi.
ms-05.22.12

I'd often heard the story that William Faulkner wanted to publish The Sound and the Fury using colored inks to signify the time of various sections of Benjy's narrative. Well, what do you know? The Folio Society has done it. Wow.
jc-05.17.12

Relink for Coop. The funniest thing a parent will ever read. "Sit just as I have told you, and do not lean to one side or the other, nor slide down until you are nearly slid away. Heed me; for if you sit like that, your hair will go into the syrup. And now behold, even as I have said, it has come to pass." Ian Frazier's Laws Concerning Food and Drink.
kg-05.16.12

"Don't use an exclamation mark in a moment of anger. If you insert one in a fit of temper, lay aside the letter until morning. You will be surprised how silly it will seem then -- not only the exclamation mark but the whole letter." —James Thurber.
jc-05.15.12

By taking a closer look at Shakespeare's words – specifically his insults – we see why he is known as a master playwright whose works transcend time and appeal to audiences all over the world.
dw-05.15.12

"During the Games an aircraft carrier will dock on the Thames. Surface-to-air missile systems will scan the skies. Unmanned drones, thankfully without lethal missiles, will loiter above the gleaming stadiums and opening and closing ceremonies. RAF Typhoon Eurofighters will fly from RAF Northolt. A thousand armed US diplomatic and FBI agents and 55 dog teams will patrol an Olympic zone partitioned off from the wider city by an 11-mile, £80m, 5,000-volt electric fence." A look at the security for the 2012 London Olympics.
ms-05.15.12

"'It's weird that Seinfeld signed in pencil though.' That was weird. Almost as weird as how the S in Seinfeld looked exactly like the S in my dad's signature." Bygone Bureau on their parents' tallest tales.
dw-05.09.12

Rosecrans writes, "In January I hit the road for two weeks to ask people around America—specifically people who live in or near U.S. towns called Paris—what they think about the French. From cowboys in Idaho to vegan shop-owners in Texas, to Kentuckians who know the right way to pronounce Versailles."Part 1 of 4 is up today. Great.
jc-05.07.12

"We believe architecture brings us closer to history the way medieval pilgrims believed relics brought them closer to Christ." Great long read/photo essay about nostalgia from Sweet Juniper: "The Fauxtopias of Detroit's Suburbs."
sd-05.02.12

"If you can be bothered to read to the back of Wallpaper Magazine, I imagine you'll find the page where they list all the job openings for the position of Famous Designer: 'Need not apply unless strangely enthusiastic about crafting beautiful, terrible furniture for rich people.' The case against chairs.
ms-05.01.12

"It's actually a lot of trouble, these days, to get the diaeresis to stick over the vowels." —Mary Norris for NYer.
jc-04.30.12

Zoe Zolbrod's love letter to the greatest city in North America. Brilliantly observed and dead-on accurate.
jc-04.29.12

"While you check the weather, I find out why California dermatologists hate the one weird skin care secret discovered by a stay-at-home mom. While you read the New York Times, I rollover for more information about how to get my diabetes under control." Mike Lacher is the one who clicks banner ads.
jc-04.27.12

"I imagine getting a consensus about art among any 20 people is difficult. And I very much doubt the Bronte sisters ever agreed what the best book was in any given year." A Coalition of Dunces, John Warner and Kevin Guilfoile chat about this year's Pulitzer award for fiction, or lack thereof.
jc-04.19.12

Related to the last and highly recommended, The University of Chicago edition of Maclean's A River Runs Through It with wood engravings by Barry Moser.
jc-04.17.12

"And to think that the rare moment in history came to me when I could in actuality have written the prose masterpiece for all rejected authors- and I didn't even see that history had swung wide its doors to me." CP hero Norman Maclean called this letter to Alfred A. Knopf "one of the best things I ever wrote."
jc-04.17.12

"A taxpayer with a child who qualifies as a dependent can deduct from adjusted gross income monies paid to a child care provider. If you are a lone crusader, then this deduction is not available to you--but if you have a sidekick, then consider making him or her your legal ward." Nine Tax Deductions of the Superhero Set.
ms-04.17.12

"An act dwelling in the margins, an almost hidden narrative running beneath the main vehicular text." Tom Vanderbilt's great long read about the death of hoofing it: "The Crisis in American Walking."
sd-04.16.12

"What makes the Renaissance different? Renaissance paintings look more realistic, good. What else? There are more decapitations, absolutely. You feel slightly attracted to the naked men and women, OK. Fewer weird-looking Jesus babies. Good, good." Advanced Amateur Art History by Chas Gillespie.
jc-04.16.12

"They can play video games while we pop bonbons and watch the soaps and talk shows." Who knew former FDIC chair Sheila Bair was so funny?jc-04.14.12

"The punchline is that the woman's husband has died." FAQ: Alt Comedy.
sd-04.12.12

"Don Johnson won nearly $6 million playing blackjack in one night, single-handedly decimating the monthly revenue of Atlantic City's Tropicana casino. Not long before that, he'd taken the Borgata for $5 million and Caesars for $4 million. Here's how he did it."
ms-04.09.12

"They dine lavishly on fresh meat, while the other inmates and I are fed hash or some sort of dry nuggets. Although I make my contempt for the rations perfectly clear, I nevertheless must eat something in order to keep up my strength. The only thing that keeps me going is my dream of escape. In an attempt to disgust them, I once again vomit on the carpet." Excerpts from a Cat's Diary.
dw-04.02.12

"What you get in this Tumblr scene is imitators of imitators of imitators, each less skilled than the one before them." Sound of Silence, Sounds of Confusion from Things Magazine.
jc-03.30.12

"My predispositions: I rarely care for westerns, especially not sad ones. I quite like a smutty book, especially a funny one."
The ToB version of the Final Four starts today with the first Zombie Round Match, The Sisters Brothers versus Lightning Rods as judged by E. Lockhart. Do yourself a favor and read the commentary and comment threads from the last few matches as this year's tourney heads to its epic conclusion.
jc-03.28.12

"What saddens me is that Austin was making a linguistic observation, and it's basically almost true. This may be a budding linguist, and he's been kicked out of his high school for a syntactic observation." — Geoffrey K. Pullum. The observation? "Fuck is one of those fucking words you can fucking put anywhere in a fucking sentence and it still fucking makes sense."
jc-03.26.12

Native Tongues, a long, entertaining piece by Simon Winchester on the production of The Dictionary of Regional American English, including tales of "Word Wagons" scouring the landscape in search of local terms for things like "kissing vigorously" or "sleeping late" or "staring open-mouthed."
jc-03.21.12

"So, I am currently serving a six-month sentence in the Outagamie County Jail for a non-violent offense. It's a bit of a slacker's paradise in here. The upside is that I can read all damn day long without guilt, if I please." So begins the Tournament of Books Quarterfinals, The Sense of an Ending versus Lightning Rods, judged by Roxy Reno.
jc-03.20.12

"Technically, the biggest difference between what a burglar does and what I do is that the burglar wants to get in and out quickly and doesn't care if the safe ever gets used again." -Ken Doyle, Safecracker.
jc-03.20.12

On this day in 1924 a great American novel was published. Luckily the author decided not to title it The High Bouncing Lover.jc-03.19.12

The Marriage Plot takes on Green Girl to wrap up the first week of The Tournament of Books today. John and Kevin's post-decision analysis is great and it's been noted but worth repeating, the comment threads are really excellent in this year's ToB.
jc-03.16.12

"Mandatory group yoga exercise across from my former workplace, Reel Life Video Store, on Eighth Avenue, every afternoon at two o'clock, to a chant of my new nickname, 'Dear Condo Leader.' The purpose of this will be to prove, once and for all, that I did not deserve to be fired in May 2004 for 'having an attitude' and 'stealing from the adult section.'"
ms-03.14.12

"Go to the top of the tallest hill from which you can't quite see the ocean. Wait four centuries then for paving equipment and cedar tree. Sorry about the eighties, those neighbors are gone. Dress warm." Directions to Our House, By Andrew Nicholls.
jc-03.12.12

"Thus Odysseus commanded his brave compatriot, Bob Faliveno, to bind him fast and also put on the Bangles CD as they passed the Frontage Road exit..." The Commuter's Odyssey, by Paul Houseman.
jc-03.08.12

The Great Discontent has a nice long chat with our favorite Miss who is Swiss, Tina Roth Eisenberg.
jc-03.06.12

Issue 6 of The Ride Journal just arrived in the post. I'm stating without qualification that it is the very best and most beautiful issue of the very best and most beautiful bicycle magazine on the planet, and that you should go right to the site and order your copy today. Plus, it smells great and comes with a Field Notes ad near the back. Congrats to Andrew and Philip Diprose.
jc-03.05.12

"It is important to remember that even though you will not be joining us at Vassar next fall and that other students will be doing exactly that, which is to say, attending Vassar, you still have many, many options at your disposal." An Apology From Vassar, by Jason Roeder.
jc-02.28.12

"At the end of the street is the reassuring sight of a nightwatchman, now able to see and protect the respectable citizens. They were the great beneficiaries of the great illumination; the victims were those to whom the streets had belonged when darkness ruled - students, the young in general, servants, vagrants, prostitutes and drinkers." The Reinvention of the Night, Tim Blanning reviews Craig Koslofsky's Evening's Empire. Via Kurt Loder.
jc-02.23.12

Speaking of great designers' children's books, any budding infant designer will love Sparkle and Spin by Ann (not Ayn!) and Paul Rand.
bb-02.21.12

In 1962, Saul Bass collaborated with former librarian Leonore Klein on his only children's book, which spent decades as a prized out-of-print collector's item. This month, exactly half a century later, Rizzoli is reprinting Henri's Walk to Paris.
dw-02.21.12

"She stands on the unpaved road with your newborn son on her breast. Even though she can't hear you over the sound of the helicopter, you're screaming the words. Six months and you'll send for her. You promise." Lots of Ways to Say I Love You, by Paul Ford. Via Maria Popova.
jc-02.14.12

"If someone comes in and asks for a recommendation and you ask for the name of a book that they liked and they can't think of one, the person is not really a reader. Recommend Nicholas Sparks." 25 things I learned from opening a bookstore.
ms-02.06.12

"In other words to be fully awake to everything about you & the more you learn the more you can appreciate & get a full measure of joy & happiness out of life. I do not think a young fellow should be too serious, he should be full of the Dickens some times to create a balance." A letter to 16 year-old Jackson Pollack from his pretty spectacular Dad.
ms-02.03.12

Two interesting, little known facts of history learned from this story. First, that the designer of the US Capitol building wanted to try and reanimate George Washington. Second, that our first President's last words included "die hard."
sd-01.30.12

Hey tweeters, looking for the most appropriate apt word, only shorter? Try David Friedman's Thsrs.
jc-01.30.12

"9. If all else fails, I drink half a bottle of rum and play a Handel oratorio on the gramophone. This generally produces an uncontrollable gush of copy." I Am a Lousy Copywriter by David Ogilvy. Via Jason Fried.
jc-01.24.12

"Some in the kingdom thought the cause of the darkness must be the Router. Little was known of the Router, legend told it had been installed behind the recliner long ago by a shadowy organization known as Comcast. Others in the kingdom believed it was brought by a distant cousin many feasts ago." (Relink, because it is awesome).
ms-01.23.12

Zulkey's interview with Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, which was later adapted into the popular musical.
sd-01.20.12

"Lo, in the twilight days of the second year of the second decade of the third millennium did a great darkness descend over the wireless internet connectivity of the people of 276 Ferndale Street in the North-Central lands of Iowa." By conquering hero Mike Lacher.
jc-01.20.12

On the Limits of Anthropomorphic Machines, Parts One and Two. By Charles Holland.
jc-01.20.12

Since we are talking about books, do yourself a favor and pick up FotA Charlie Newton's second book, Start Shooting. Highly recommended as was his first, Calumet City. Once you start either book, cancel all your plans until you are finished, you'll thank me for that.
ms-01.18.12

"For those Second Lifers in my address book, you may be saddened to learn that my avatar, Molesto the Scrote' With Wheels, has been reimagined as a slacks-wearing, ideal job candidate, but-FEAR NOT!--my SL Marketplace shop will continue to sell the highest-quality virtual sex-bicycles in the Blacksilk district." Job-friendly updates to my online profiles.
ms-01.11.12

Related to the last, Jon Horvath used GPS and excerpts from Jack Kerouac's On the Road to create these line drawings.
dw-01.10.12

"I respect the raptors, aloof and freewheeling killers that they are. I could not let this one die. Not because I'm a good person (obviously). But because it was awesome." Sweet Juniper's "...And a Red-Tailed Hawk in Our Christmas Tree." Best holiday story you'll read all day. Great from start to finish.
sd-12.22.11

Near the end of the 1800s, it was all the rage to indicate your feelings toward a potential suitor or close friend by the angle of a stamp on a letter (e.g. placing it upside down on the bottom left-hand corner meant "I am always true to you."). The Language of Stamps. Turns out I've been unintentionally saying "I love you" on all the bills I've paid over the years.
sd-12.22.11

"It worked like this: everyone involved sent me their postal address, while I headed down to the local Post Office and bought a job lot of stamps." Twitter by Post, by Giles Turnbull.
jc-12.14.11

You can now browse through the papers and notebooks of Sir Issac Newton online. Via I09.
ms-12.13.11

"We've faced many challenges over the years, and each and every time we've discovered that courage is the answer. Hyenas don't understand that." When Animals Run Attack Ads, by Ben Greenman.
jc-12.13.11

"So, motherfuckers, sweet sweet angels of imperfection, on this Sunday, a day I am grieving for a man I never met, I am also singing you a love song, an out of key melody with rusty rhythm, mud in the middle, and dirty words at the end." You're Not Awesome, by Melissa Pierce. Amen.
jc-12.09.11

"The guilt-tinged thrill of reading private letters to other people was dampened by the note's banality. 'Dear Douglas, I have a favor to ask...' There was nothing illicit or secret, nothing mystical or magical about it. Except that it was addressed to a dead man." Address Unknown, by Leah Anderst for TMN. Stopped me cold in the middle of a busy day. A must-read.
jc-12.01.11

"When a place has been around long enough, you stop measuring in minutes." A lovely short piece by Dave Pell, The Return of Amigo.
jc-11.30.11

"What appears to be an ordinary period is in fact a TwitDot, and it contains a message that could never, as a result of its length, have fit within the confines of a single tweet." Size Matters, from inventor Ben Greenman.
jc-11.29.11

"A Qantas Empire Airways safety card, drawn in the wink-and-grin style of a men's magazine cartoon, depicts a sporting fellow leaning over the side of a lifeboat, flirting with a long, lean, blonde mermaid, much to the annoyance of his wife." The Unlikely Event, by Avi Steinberg. Via Maud Newton.
jc-11.29.11

A redesigned It's Nice That No.7 is out and, as usual, it's full of smart features and contributors like Terry Jones of i-D and Benjamin Sommerhalder of Nieves.
jc-11.28.11

"Bureaucratically dowdy, rarely spotted in the field, a dull fucker by both instinct and training, Smiley drops no one-liners, romances no tarot-card readers, roars no speedboats through the Bayou." James Parker on George Smiley, The Anti-James Bond. Via Casual Optimist.
jc-11.16.11

"The apology is for contributing to watering down the impact of certain words so that, as is currently the case in our culture, there is no longer an arsenal of expletives available to go to when you are legitimately pissed off." —Earl Pomerantz.
jc-11.15.11

"I apologize for the delay; we are currently experiencing significant existential strife as indicated by the soft wailing of the train's wheels as they are forced once more into another day of mindless repetition."
ms-11.11.11

"I'm convinced the estate wants Vonnegut to remain caught, like a bug in amber, to borrow the phrase from Slaughterhouse-Five— forever a jokey, avuncular counterculture guru. That image was, and continues to be, a moneymaker." Charles Shields chats about his new KV biography And So It Goes.jc-11.10.11

"Damn baby, I don't usually send messages like this but your man be a lucky man. I'm jealous. My girlfriend is still hot though." It Happened to Sophia Kercher.
jc-11.09.11

"...how six months can become eight years with the deceptive ease of a film dissolve, for that is how those years appear to me now, in a long sequence of sentimental dissolves and old-fashioned trick shots—the Seagram Building fountains dissolve into snowflakes, I enter a revolving door at twenty and come out a good deal older, and on a different street." —the incomparable Joan Didion. Via Sippey.
jc-11.04.11

"...impressed by an occasional striking passage, which, lacking the quotation marks, he is not sure whether to attribute to himself or to someone far cleverer, funnier and more articulate, whom he happened to be reading at the time." Charles Simic suggets you take care of your little notebook.
jc-11.02.11

$50 Under 11.5 Rounds Floyd Mayweather, Jr. vs. Victor Ortiz. Fading the Vig: A Gambler's Guide to Life by David Hill. "Each column will tell the story of a single bet that he made and examine what that bet reveals about life in America."
jc-10.31.11

"In response to the e-mail we all received from Maddie's parents, in which they shared their decision to raise their daughter dogma-free, yes, there will be an altar, but please be assured that the Day of the Dead is a pagan celebration of life and has nothing to do with God."
ms-10.20.11

Language geek alert. The King's English. "through the King James Bible, phrase by phrase."
jc-10.10.11

"No human before or since Bill Rankin is known to have parachuted through a cumulonimbus tower and lived to tell about it. Lt Col William Henry Rankin passed away on 06 July 2009, almost exactly 50 years after his harrowing and history-making ride on the storm. Cue epic organ solo."Rider on the Storm. Via Mental Floss.
ms-10.10.11

"This disclaimer is not unlike the ceaseless blaring of a distant car alarm—a once-sincere warning that has evolved into an unpleasant nuisance, rendered meaningless by its own ubiquity." Alright, Fine, I'll Add a Disclaimer to My Emails, by James Sinclair.
jc-10.04.11

Local note for NY: Tomorrow night our esteemed guest editor John Sellers will read from his memoirThe Old Man and the Swamp at WORD in Brooklyn. Also, Wednesday evening he'll be chatting with Chuck Klosterman about his new novel The Visible Man.
dw-10.03.11

Zulkey's interview today with Tom Skilling proves two things most people already knew: a) the guy really, really likes talking about the weather, and b) he's the nicest human on the planet.
sd-09.30.11

"Afflicted by Vapors When Seeing You on Horseback". Masterpiece Theater's Missed Connections.
ms-09.29.11

In 1996, Paul Lukas and some friends found 375 report cards from the Manhattan Trade School for Girls. He decided to do some investigating and the result is a fascinating series of articles for Slate, Permanent Record.
ms-09.28.11

"From a linguistic point of view, this misunderstanding points to a problem that vanity plates share with most orthographic systems. A reader must decide how to group the sequence of symbols, and how to interpret the result." How do you read ILVTOFU?
jc-09.26.11

"Reluctant to admit we'd wasted our hard-earned vacations on a stupid, money-losing, cross-country ordeal that wasn't going to accomplish a damn thing, the four of us turned on one another like rabid weasels — or, I should say, my bandmates turned on me." Jim DeRogatis is a Field Tester. Read tons more reviews online, or better yet, buy the book.
jc-09.22.11

Merci de nous avoir liberes! Scans from a Belgian phrasebook published near the end of WWII.
sd-09.21.11

The concept of Doubling in the Middle, and other things pallindromic, from a master. By Gregory Kornbluth. Wow, we've sure come a long way from Panama.
jc-09.21.11

"With Harrison it is impossible to feel something so simple as friendship. He seems to me the closest thing we have to a tribal elder. If writers ever required permission to raid another tribe and steal its corn, we would need to ask Harrison." The Last Lion, an excellent profile of CP hero, novelist Jim Harrison, by Tom Bissell.
jc-09.21.11

"In so much of life, I cannot relax. A part of me is assessing whether or not my contribution's needed. Another part of me is worried that my kids are annoying someone. But not at sporting events. Am I needed? Not at all. Are my kids annoying? Hardly!" Lost and Found, by my sis, at The Baseball Chronicle.
jc-09.16.11

"If you come here and say, 'I need to dangle a 10,000-pound whale from the ceiling of my uncle's bathroom,' they tell you how to make it happen." An interesting profile of Compleat Sculptor, where NY artists shop for stone.
sd-09.12.11

"Even now, I can't think of her without remembering the Good Conductor on that late-night train to Peterborough and, to this day, I won't hear a bad word said about British Rail." A Real Good Samaritan. Via MeFi.
ms-09.07.11

"We're bending the entire spectrum of light --infrared, ultraviolet, thermal, people are disappearing. It doesn't use cameras or mirrors or require power." Invisible, Inc, by Bruce Barcott. Via Mefi.
jc-08.31.11

Totally random and not to be a smug city-dweller about things, but if this book was written today, it would have a question mark and be funny. Though the cover would stay the same because it's awesome. Via Letterology.
sd-08.30.11

"The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and Laugh-In. These two comedy-variety shows, we are often told, appealed to the same acid-tripping, free-love, anti-war demographic. Today they are often considered two sides of the same coin. Nothing could be further from the truth." The Comedy Writer That Helped Elect Richard M. Nixon, great, long piece by Kliph Nesteroff.
jc-08.30.11

Zulkey really stirred up the pot and got some people mighty miffed by ranting against FiveFingers shoes (those types of barefoot-looking footwear, also known as "the worst thing in the world").
sd-08.26.11

These might be reposts, but they go together nicely: Ray Bradbury for the kids and for the ladies. (That second link couldn't be more NSFW)
bb-08.22.11

Zulkey interviews Scott Aukerman, comedian, writer and performer on Mr. Show, and co-creator of Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis.
sd-08.19.11

Sometimes true crime is just too strange, particularly when it involves an art gallery, hired martial arts goons, and the lead artist of a beloved cartoon franchise: "SpongeBob Artist Accused of 'Brutal' Attack."
sd-08.19.11

"Buzzwords are frequently used in news media. These are words that do not typically occur in everyday speech, but are common among newscasters, talking heads, and pundits on cable news. Newswordy is a growing collection of these words, updated every weekday. Along with each word is a definition, a quote with its use (or misuse) in the media, and a news and Twitter feed on the subject."
dw-08.15.11

"I can remember nights at the dinner table with my parents tossing out different numbers. 'Catch-27?' Nah, my father shook his head. 'Catch-539?' Too long, too lumbering. I had no idea what they were talking about." Erica Heller, in the Paris Review.
jc-08.10.11

On Monday morning, August 21 1911, inside the Louvre museum in Paris, a plumber named Sauvet came upon an unidentified man stuck in front of a locked door. The man - wearing a white smock, like all the Louvre's maintenance staff - pointed out to Sauvet that the doorknob was missing. The helpful Sauvet opened the door with his key and some pliers. The man walked out of the museum and into the Parisian heatwave. Hidden under his smock was Leonardo da Vinci's 'Mona Lisa'.
ms-08.10.11

"My boss said, 'You have to get rid of this cat because it was polluted by radiation. You must dump it in the sea.' However, I can't do it for the following reasons. First of all, this cat alive, second, if I dump it in the sea, the sea will be polluted by the cat." Pony and "A" Take Over the World.
ms-08.01.11

"A tiny group of savvy bettors, among them highly trained computer scientists from MIT and Northeastern University, virtually take over the game." Great story about gaming the Massachusetts lottery. Via J-Walk.
sd-08.01.11

Related to the last. The Chronicles of Amber are all good but it's The Corwin Cycle that is perfect. BTW: Harry fans might find something new to love here.
jc-07.29.11

"Children who are scared of clowns will be taken from their parents and treated to special one-on-one Laff Sessions with one of our clowns in a Clown Consortium Kiosk. These sessions will last as long as it take--days, even--to ensure that the children are no longer scared of clowns!" The Birthday Clown Consortium Price Guide.
ms-07.29.11

"Longtime Angeleno Mark Evanier further surmised that Dino's Lodge outlasted Jerry's because 'Dean Martin's name suggested a classy evening of good Italian food and wine, whereas Jerry's implied an evening of food being thrown at you by loud waiters.'" The Rise and Fall of Dino's Lodge, by Kliph Nesteroff.
jc-07.29.11

"The creative gift is a scarce commodity, and patience and imitation have always done most of its work." Raymond Chandler on Writers in Hollywood, from the Atlantic in 1945. A bit more on this most entertaining and insightful essay from Maud Newton.
jc-07.27.11

"There is a scooter in our office. People ride around on it and nobody cares. There's also rollerblades and a putting green. For a while we thought we had some pogo sticks, but they turned out to be a set of polio crutches belonging to a client. We bent them up pretty bad." I'm a Social Media Rockstar.
ms-07.26.11

"As I stood among the ransacked ruin that had been my home, surveying the aftermath of the senseless horrors and atrocities that had been perpetrated on my family and everything I hold dear, I swore to myself that no matter where I had to go, no matter what I had to do or endure, I would find the man who did this... and when I did, when I did, oh, there would be words." Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest Winners.
jc-07.26.11

"Hey, intellectuals! My fellow weenies! Our culture totally, world-historically, down-to-the-sub-atomic-level sucks -- even our low culture sucks now, despite all our self-important ingenious attempts to elevate it or make it seem more complicated or subversive or internally self-critiquing or whatever than it really is; I mean Harry Potter, come on, it wasn't just the biggest children's movie ever, it was the biggest everyone-including-adults-including-ones-who-went-to-"good"-colleges adults movie ever -- and it's all our fucking fault!" Good morning from Walter Kirn.
jc-07.22.11

"The tide brings in status updates; the tide takes them out." Brilliantly written think-piece by Paul Ford for NY Mag on media and society (God, that makes it sound boring, it's anything but.) Facebook and the Epiphanator.
jc-07.19.11

"If Vonnegut speaks to the eternal adolescent mind, it's because he so ably inhabits its favorite moods: hellacious pessimism and utopian love. How he balances the two—if he balances them, really—is an open question, and part of the wonder." Jacob Rubin for NY Mag on Kurt Vonnegut: Novels & Stories, 1963-1973.jc-07.19.11

American McCarver, a great new highly opinionated sports blog from Gruber, Monteiro, Snell, Sippey, Michaels, Knauss, Anker and Catalano. Seems like they need one more to make a starting nine.
jc-06.30.11

"We have spent time with some of our best people and we have come up with a few ideas. Here are the four that received the most traction in-house." Al Qaeda: The Rebrand, fab, from Ben Greenman in the NYer.
jc-06.28.11

"If your flight is delayed, keep in mind that it's probably because the pilot and crew know that the airplane is full of cracks, and they're buying time." Katie Heaney's valuable advice on How to Not Die in a Plane Crash.
sd-06.22.11

Byliner is live, and looks great. Original writing, not so long as a book, not so short as a newspaper article.
jc-06.21.11

William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway: "He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary." Ernest Hemingway on William Faulkner: "Poor Faulkner, Does he really think big emotions come from big words?" The 30 harshest author-on-author insults in history.
ms-06.21.11

Would be difficult for anyone to ever top this lede: "K. Narayanan does not allow anyone to touch his miniature animal figurines."
sd-06.20.11

"Ann Guilfoile: How come there are so many characters unlike your sister in your books? Kevin Guilfoile: Are you kidding? My books are filled with liars and sociopaths." KG visits Madame Perry's Salon.
jc-06.16.11

"...have you ever edited and sent the files to a printer to be reproduced several thousand times? It's terrifying. There is a pervasive hopelessness to the entire process." Post-Artifact Books and Publishing. It's by Craig Mod, so you must read it.
jc-06.14.11

The synthesis of Circle A (Faulkner readers) and Circle B (NWA fans) is this T-shirt.
wm-06.14.11

Dave Eggers makes a case for how great Wrigley Field is. However, fans of other Chicago-based teams (or baseball in general), will read it as validation of how horrible Wrigley Field is.
sd-06.14.11

"...when you inspect the image of Hemingway-as-hero, you uncover an extraordinary sub-stratum of self-harming. You discover that, for just over half of his life, Hemingway seemed hell-bent on destroying himself." A great long read. John Walsh unravels the mystery behind Hemingway's suicide.
jc-06.14.11

"In all, 1,746 people were killed. The villages of Nyos, Kam, Cha, and Subum were left all but wiped out. And, more than 3,500 livestock perished in a matter of minutes." The killer? A lake.
ms-06.10.11

"Short-sighted, technically illiterate penny-pinchers are wounding a great art form." Roger Ebert on The Dying of the Light.
ms-06.06.11

"Collections tell stories. Often, they represent a personal narrative or reveal some interesting character traits of the collector." Collecting History from Eight:48, by the team at Display a fantastic resource for modern design.
jc-06.02.11

"In 1993, when The New Yorker for the first time ran a photograph of a bare-breasted actress, a subscriber wrote me to express outrage at what had happened to a magazine once known for its elegant, understated prose. The only defence I could think of was that they were small breasts, so you could say that the tradition of understatement was still alive." How Calvin Trillin got dirty words into The New Yorker.
jc-06.02.11

"I listen to Johnny breathing beside me and feel a cloying terror. Not because of Johnny's capability for violence, but because he is reading the book manuscript I wrote about him." Lori Andrews is a Field Tester. Summer reading season is upon us. Plan well with the Field Tested Books Book.jc-05.27.11

With her show going off the air, the Norwegian browser company Opera is going to miss Oprah, because now they're sure to get fewer accidental letters sent to them. Here's their Best of Oprah Mails to Opera.
sd-05.26.11

The latest issue of McSweeney's has been released. And even though our SD just contributed a very short Letter to the Editor in it, his name is still listed above both Jonathan Franzen's and Joyce Carol Oates' in the table of contents, which surely must be worth something.
bb-05.23.11

"The Penguin tote: You had a really enjoyable time flirting with the idea of working in the publishing industry. This tote bag is all you have to remember those times by." What Your Tote Bag Says About You, by Jason Diamond and Tobias Carroll.
jc-05.12.11

"I knew how it was supposed to go. There would be a visit from a striking bald man in a wheelchair, visiting my parents to tell them I was a gifted child who needed to attend his special school for gifted children in Westchester. My parents would acquiesce, saying it was better for me to be with people more like me, and I would go, and in Westchester I would be told I was an X-Man now." Great lede. Fanboy by Alexander Chee at TMN.
jc-05.11.11

"The JofUR solicits any and all types of manuscript: poetry, prose, visual art, and research articles. You name it, we take it, and reject it. Your manuscript may be formatted however you wish. Frankly, we don't care." The official blog.
ms-04.28.11

Pretty sure every parent has wanted to or actually said this to their child and now there is a book.
ms-04.26.11

"By then only 19 fans remained in frigid McCoy Stadium, along with players, coaches and staff; two reporters; one scorer; and two broadcasters..." Stefan Fatsis reviews Bottom of the 33rd by Dan Barry.
jc-04.26.11

Pruned's awesome series Impossible Chicagos is part fantasy, part dream, part nightmare, just like the city it's about. They're up to 10.
jc-04.25.11

The house from H.P. Lovecraft's short story "The Shunned House" is for sale in Providence, Rhode Island. Unfortunately, judging from the listing, it looks like you'll need to provide your own flamethrower and sulfuric acid if you want to kill the monster in the basement.
sd-04.20.11

"The mannequin seemed so happy, so carefree in his plaid shirt and cargo shorts, forever about to throw a frisbee. That could be me, I thought." The Dressing Room At Old Navy gets rated expertly by Joshua Allen.
jc-04.20.11

For MS: info on Spoiled, the novel by the Go Fug Yourself writers. My wife's read an advanced copy and says its fantastic.
sd-04.18.11

"Why do they continue to come here? They can't all have brain tumors. The only rationally conceivable answer is: Paris. Paris has superpowers; Paris exerts a mercurial force field." A.A. Gill's wonderfully terrible review of L'Ami Louis, a restaurant popular with Americans and the British.
sd-04.18.11

Tree of Codes, a film showing the making of an impossibly complicated die-cut book. Thanks JSM.
jc-04.14.11

"I could never explain to anyone else how I stored our glorious sleep-deprived moments in a velvety pink balloon that floated in the back of my mind." The Routes by Which I Attempted to Contact You, by Sheridan Macauley.
jc-04.12.11

Today is The Morning News Tournament of Books Championship Match, Freedom versus A Visit From the Goon Squad. Hands down, this year's tourney has been the best one ever, by the quality of the judging and commentary and by the fact that it's got me to read four new books. Congrats to... I won't spoil it for you.
jc-04.04.11

In honor of opening day, James Earl Jones narrates Casey At The Bat.
ms-04.01.11

NPR interviews author Henning Mankell about his latest and last Kurt Wallander novel, The Troubled Man. Part of me wants to start the book immediately, part of me just wants to wait until I am ready to say good-bye.
ms-04.01.11

"I know quality writing, and know a lot of other people who know quality writing. A sample chapter presented to my mother's book club was described as, and I quote, "'like nothing they had ever read before.' My high school English teacher told me that I should submit it right away, even though I only shared the first half of the first draft." Real or fake, best cover letter ever.
ms-03.29.11

"He killed dozens, if not hundreds. He disposed of their corpses in an unimaginably disgusting way. He murdered his accomplice. The only bright spot in this otherwise entirely unredeemed life is that he never existed." An in-depth look at Sweeney Todd's Ancestors.
dw-03.28.11

"I'm not going to read you any bedtime stories or sing you any lullabies, and if you think that every year on your birthday I'm going to tell you where I was when I went into labor with you, then think again, because I won't, because I didn't." I'm Not Here to Hold Your Hand: I'm Here to Run a Business, by Brian Bieber.
jc-03.21.11

So you know: the AP Stylebook has been updated and now "email" no longer needs a hyphen and "cellphone" and "smartphone" are both just single words.
sd-03.21.11

The Tournament of Books Quarterfinals start today. I think this has been the best ToB yet, as evidenced by the three books it has motivated me to buy and read, Savages,Bad Marie and Lord of Misrule. (All three first-round losers btw.)
jc-03.21.11

"Jennifer Weiner has written one of the best judging commentaries in the history of the tournament... But here's the thing: I don't care. I couldn't put Bad Marie down." John Warner, in his commentary about Match Two of the Tournament of Books.
jc-03.09.11

"Thou small-volted energizer, alkaline and acid-crammed, in a bare fortnight spent!" The contents of Scott David Herman's desk as Shakespearean insults.
jc-03.09.11

Shaun Usher's fab Letters of Note has joined our advertising network for design, web and creative professionals, The Deck. If you have a product or service that could benefit by being in front of millions of savvy, curious, mostly good-looking people, give us a shout. There are a few slots still open in April and May.
jc-03.02.11

FotA James Kennedy has launched a project with the New York Public Library: the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival. Take any book that's ever won a Newbery Medal and make a film covering its entire plot in 90 seconds or less.
sd-02.21.11

Randomly just stumbled upon this scan of the meeting minutes from the 1946 encounter between Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein, which ended in philosophy's most famous fight. Highly recommended for anyone who has read the incredible book Wittgenstein's Poker.
sd-02.14.11

A big congrats to our current Guest Editor, Jami Attenberg, who just sold her latest novel, The Middlesteins. Can't wait to read it.
sd-02.14.11

The Ride, a journal about bicycles, featuring some stunning illustrations. Via We Made This.
sd-02.07.11

"Like everyone else, I assumed that the lottery was unbreakable... There's no way there could be a flaw, and there's no way I just happened to discover the flaw on my walk home." Cracking the Scratch-Off Lottery Code, by Jonah Lehrer for Wired.
jc-02.07.11

A new collaborative project "publishing lists of books that esteemed members of the design community identify as personally important, meaningful, and formative." Designers & Books. Our picks for required design reads can be found in the library.
sd-02.03.11

Congrats to FotA Jeff Rutzky on the publication of his book, Shadowfolds.
ms-02.03.11

"After examining the painting, Penn looked on an online message board for museum registrars and found that 'Father Arthur Scott' did not exist, and neither did his rich mother nor his sister Emily in Paris. They had just played host to Mark Augustus Landis, the man responsible for the longest, strangest forgery spree the American art world has known."
ms-01.24.11

The Times-Picayune accidentally lskdjf fkdasds all over the fgrasdf.
sd-01.19.11

Q: "You've said before that your dream life is very important to you." A: "It's not been vivid for years, because I'm not having a nervous breakdown. That's when you get these really vivid electric dreams that are probably in their own way your subconscious trying to save your sorry ass." Great, entertaining Jonathan Miles interview with Jim Harrison, for Salon.
jc-01.18.11

Long-overdue, but finally just read David Mamet's On Directing Film last night. Highly recommended read for anyone, filmmaker or otherwise, who wants to think about the economy of storytelling.
sd-01.14.11

In November of 1974, a Browns fan and season ticket holder sent a letter to the team regarding a concern of his. The Cleveland Browns (specifically, their general counsel) sent back an absolutely epic response.
ms-12.23.10

"The wise men were in the kitchen making more cocktails while Jesus was being 'born' and they missed their cue. My mom ran into the kitchen and yelled 'Jesus is here!' to which the wise men responded 'Oh! Right! Sh*t. Hang in there, Jesus! We're coming!!" The Year Kenny Loggins Ruined Christmas.
ms-12.22.10

"Within an hour of landing in Buenos Aires, my already shaky relationship with a poet was over. His blog announced his sexual acts with a girl whose name was two letters different from my own, along with a declaration of his Looking For Love." Jessa Crispin is a Field Tester. Read all the reviews online or better yet, buy the Field Tested Books Book, now just nine bucks.
jc-12.10.10

"Smugopedia is a collection of slightly controversial opinions about a variety of subjects. We offer you the chance to buy a fleeting sense of self-satisfaction at the small cost of alienating your friends and loved ones."
ms-12.09.10

"The way I rub my hands together | Demonstrates that I am evil | The dark, malignant overlord | Of all information retrieval" WikiLeaks! The Musical, by Ben Greenman.
jc-12.02.10

"Our goal is to allow readers today to get a feel for what it was like to experience the conflict in real time, to hear the many voices trying to make sense of the conflict, and to sift through sometimes confused and misleading news accounts to try to discern what was actually taking place." An aggregator of the Civil War, The Long Recall. Via MeFi.
ms-12.02.10

"In the fifth grade I was taught to speed-read on a machine that projected sentences onto a wall at high speeds, sentences in the white box of a screen, flashing in a dark room." I, Reader by Alexander Chee.
jc-12.01.10

The latest issue of McSweeney's is now available in a "275-cubic-inch head crate" and features some writing by our own SD, sharing his thoughts on very minor Superman characters and indoor shooting clubs, among others.
bb-12.01.10

"I put my skepticism on the same shelf as my discomfort with page-view whoring and the depreciation of my chosen profession, polished up my resume, and uploaded it to Demand's resume-processing / world-domination cyberhub." Jessanne Collins' summer on a content farm/
jc-11.05.10

"Last year, we were voted one of the top ten employers in our office park, and that's because there's nothing we value more than our dedicated employees. Truly, we heart them." About Our Company, by Yuk Ling Ho.
jc-11.03.10

"Today, the more people you have listening to music, the quieter it gets." How Tuning Out Led to Tuning In. Brilliant, from Tweetage Wasteland.
jc-11.02.10

"It's not just about the t-shirts... but it's kinda about the t-shirts." Omnivoracious on the Threadless book.
jc-10.20.10

"Christmas was coming, and while I was afraid to talk to Leslie, I thought a gift might show her how I felt." Candygram from Mister Zeldman.
jc-10.19.10

The Lost, Unpublished Dr. Seuss Manuscript. "It consists of nineteen handwritten and drawn pages, the first seven of which are completely in the hand of Dr. Seuss. The remaining pages are mostly written by an assistant with corrections and doodles by Dr. Seuss, some taped on." Thanks Henry.
sd-10.18.10

"Even if you are the nicest guy in the world and you get to 800 million friends, you will ultimately make 30 to 33 million honest-to-goodness enemies, and maybe, if you're lucky, convert less than 3000 of those enemies into friends." The Unedited Version of 'The Social Network' movie poster.
ms-10.15.10

"Shivering, I can barely make out a tiny light overhead. I sense I could reach it, but only if I fashion a ladder from these Twizzlers you've left for me." Jessi Arrington's Candygram.
jc-10.13.10

"In tomorrow's New York Times, reporter Helene Stapinski performs what might appear to be a near-impossible feat of journalism dexterity: producing a college professor to support her thesis that more Americans now consume spaghetti tacos than ever before." The Times' go-to professor, Robert J. Thompson, appears again.
sd-10.06.10

Related to the last, my Beloc impersonation, To Sweet Hereafter, from last year.
jc-10.06.10

JSM's Candygrams are back for October and start off with Frank Chimero's Retrick/Retreat.
jc-10.06.10

Pauls Toutonghi and Ben Greenman (who tore it up as commentator in last Friday's Layer Tennis match) are reading a piece from each of the winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature and then writing letters to one another about what they've read: Nobel Reprise.
sd-10.05.10

"I can work 25 hours a day if necessary, live on any reasonable salary, and don't give a black damn for job security, office politics, or adverse public relations." Hunter S. Thompson's 1958 letter to the Vancouver Sun, asking for a job.
sd-10.04.10

"The journals include a variety of colourful tales of 18th and 19th century ship life, from drunken rum-related incidents, venereal disease, scurvy, shark bites and tarantulas, to lightning strikes, gun fights, mutiny, arrests and court martial - not to mention ship wrecks and even murder."
ms-10.04.10

"Almost 2,000 years after its last native speakers disappeared, the sound of Ancient Babylonian makes a comeback in an online audio archive."
dw-10.01.10

"Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts." On this day in 1985, E. B. White died.
jc-10.01.10

"As I sipped, between drunk and buzzed, suddenly there the mailman was,
Sitting near me at the bar, at the end near Diane Chambers' door.
'Another beer,' I ordered, sitting near Diane Chambers' door.
Quoth Cliff Clavin, 'Hiya, Norm." The Clavin Via Mental Flossms-09.08.10

"In the beginning, before there was such a thing as a Gutenberg Bible, Johannes Gutenberg laid out his rows of metal type and brushed them with ink and, using the mechanism that would change the world, produced an ordinary little schoolbook."
ms-08.31.10

Fortune takes a look inside the secret world of Trader Joe'sms-08.30.10

"Some of my singing engagements take place late at night, in the homes of strangers, without audiences or music, and may appear to be elaborate art or jewel heists." Accompanist Needed, by Sean Adams.
jc-08.26.10

"It amazes me, now, that any of us managed to write a word of sense during the whole decade, considering that we were all evidently stupid enough to wear flares." Kingsley and/or Martin Amis on Martin's birthday.
jc-08.25.10

"As much as Chicagoan Kevin Guilfoile loves his city, he sets it on fire in his latest thriller, The Thousand.'"A nice piece by Robert Duffer on KG's new novel. Michele and I have read it already, highly, highly recommended.
jc-08.19.10

"His voice is the driest of any great writer, drier than bone." Notes on a Voice, an appreciation of Graham Greene, by Nicholas Shakespeare.
jc-08.18.10

"We'll drag that sparkly little jewel that is about to become Mr. Chuck Norris's forehead eye onto our desktop and prepare to do a little digital surgery..." The Joy of Photoshopping, by Oyl Miller.
jc-08.17.10

For BB: Comedian Patton Oswalt gets interviewed very poorly and the interviewer blames Oswalt. "Q: What should people expect from these upcoming dates? A: A man doing jokes into a microphone? Q: Well, is there anything special about these dates as compared to previous ones? A: New material?"
sd-08.13.10

"Raw rain forest, if it's simply stripped and converted to pasture, is worth about $150 per hectare per year. But if it's used instead for sustainable uses, that figure rises to $1175." Some illustrations from The Little Book of Shocking Eco Facts.
dw-08.13.10

A final farewell from Pindeldyboz, the literary journal responsible for lots of good things (like my meeting my wife). Thanks for a fun decade.
sd-08.06.10

FotA Jami Attenberg's fantastic story of getting her bike stolen and the police sting operation that got it back. "I rode off on my bike, and I haven't been able to stop laughing and smiling for the last hour. This is one of the best days of my life, no joke."
sd-08.06.10

"Do not speak to me when you see me. If I want to to speak to you, I will do so. I want to save my throat. I don't want to ruin it by saying hello to all of you sons-of-bitches." The cheerful and reasonable Tiger Oil Memos.bb-08.06.10

" Librarians should limit themselves to one 'cat story' per day to avoid the risk of becoming a bore around the library workplace. Also, once you are home, limit yourself to one 'library story' per day to avoid becoming a bore to your cat." From the Librarian's Guide to Etiquette.
ms-08.05.10

"'Stop it!' said my Dad. 'Print is dying! Stop looking at those videos!'" The Print Is Not Dead, It Is Not Even Print. By Tess Lynch, who we have just bookmarked under 'awesome,' and not because she's using a Field Notes theme for Tumblr that we had nothing to do with. Via TMN.
jc-08.04.10

So you know. How to write a book. "Your endless internal debate and self-conjured guilt about that book you haven't written yet is a sensational waste of your time." -Michael Lopp.
jc-08.04.10

I don't even know what the hell Mark from 37s is talking about most of the time, but I love his Nuts & Bolts posts anyhow.
jc-07.30.10

"I'm a geek, and I might be a nerd, but I'm not a dork." Thump. Michael Lopp's excellent new Being Geek just landed on my desk and looks great. Available now, from O'Reilly.
jc-07.30.10

We heard this story from KG at Conference Room B the other evening and we're glad to see he wrote it up. I'll Be Hoping For the Big One Out of the Blue, a tale about an old book, Christy Mathewson, the '29 Series at Wrigley, and how you never really know what you'll find if you're not looking.
jc-07.30.10

"When you get 200 designs with strawberries, we'd do a strawberry shoe. So that's how we would do it and having our own factory, I could have a new shoe out tomorrow." A great interview with Steve Van Doren: "The History of Vans."
sd-07.29.10

"...but when my day-camp counselor asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I did not tell her that I hoped one day to correct who-whom mix-ups or determine whether 'faucetry' was a real, dictionary-approved word. I told her I wanted to be a princess." Lori Fradkin, Copy Editor.
jc-07.26.10

"...the new national pastime: Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and making determinations and judgments without a full set of facts." Tweetage Wasteland.
jc-07.23.10

"So I've resolved to reread the man. I've taken my favorite Vonnegut novel, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, down from the shelf. To my surprise, having it so near has made me anxious, as if an ex-girlfriend has returned." -Jacob Lambert for The Millions.
jc-07.21.10

"Dear husband, that first weekend we spent together, I saw you when you thought I wasn't looking. You were sitting on the futon in my tiny efficiency apartment over the shoe store and didn't realize I could see you in the hallway mirror. You had leaned your head against the wall, closed your eyes and had a look on your face like you were both in pain and in bliss all at the same time. That's how I knew you were in love with me." Dead Advice. Via Gapers Block.
ms-07.20.10

"Which means that more and more journalists are getting exposed to thinking in grids and bulk-editing and so forth. Or at least getting interns to do it for them. Which is interesting. Also, getting fired or taking a buyout helps people gain perspective on what they like doing; there's that." Real Editors Ship, by Paul Ford. Brilliant.
jc-07.20.10

"#15: Everyone shall have the right to spend overnight in the Studio working." Related to the last, and one reason we love Art.Lebedev. The Constitution.
jc-07.09.10

"Now, don't get me wrong: I still love nude, dancing girls and the promotion of nude, dancing girls to lonely men. That's why all of my strippers will remain employed by Squeezle." To the Loyal Patrons of 4 Play Diamond Lounge, by Lucas Kavner.
jc-07.09.10

"For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity's affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss--a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity's mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world's thirstiest gerbil." Congrats to Molly, winner of the this year's Bulwer-Lytton contest for bad fiction.
ms-07.01.10

"Many of the occupants were noticeably perspiring due to lack of ventilation or air conditioner, and had subsequently removed most of the their clothing." Building code violations for the Love Shack, by Curtis Retherford.
jc-06.30.10

"Even Zynga's designers seem well aware that their game is repetitive and shallow." A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz's great read "Cultivated Play: Farmville" on why so many people play the game. And for further reading: PumpkinZonia. Via DF.
sd-06.29.10

"Her friends agree to introduce me to her on one condition: that I make no mention of 'The Book', as people here refer to it." A rare meeting with the reclusive Harper Lee.
sd-06.29.10

"As we walked to the car Chris asked, 'Do you think he was embarrassed by us?' 'Oh, definitely,' I said, laughing. 'And he's not using sunscreen.'" The Other Fellow First, by my Sis.
jc-06.28.10

In support of his new book, What He's Poised To Do, Ben Greenman and I ran an experiment dubbed The Reverse Textual Rorschach, wherein, while traveling through Norway, I tried to guess what the stories in his book are about based on snippets he provided.
sd-06.25.10

"Résumé, Woodyard's latest, is an exasperating piece of literary claptrap worth less than the single sheet of paper it was printed on and the five to eight seconds it took me to scan it." A Literary Critic Reviews My Résumé, by Kent Woodyard.
jc-06.25.10

"I know. Comparing a fifteenth-century book to a defunct home video technology from the era of leotards and big hair is a bit underwhelming." The Betamax of Printing, Laura Massey's Dispatches from a Rare Book Shop.
jc-06.23.10

"Dear Goneril, I always thought you had the ugliest name. Oh, and the ugliest character. You told your father that you loved him more than words can say. Leo Sayer said that same thing, but he didn't go on to betray his father and poison his sister, at least as far as I know." Letters With Character, "letters written to fictional characters by actual people." Inspired by Ben Greenman's new collection of short stories What He's Poised To Do.jc-06.09.10

"She will not show herself, the long-dead chambermaid. For hours I have waited in Room 217, sulking and dozing upon this hotel coverlet, my clothes flung around like a teenager's, a sock here and a sock there."
ms-06.09.10

The Truth: You prefer the things you own because you rationalize your past choices to protect your sense of self." Fanboyism and Brand Loyalty.
ms-06.08.10

"Two popular types of bad copyediting are (1) editing that didn't need doing in the first place, and (2) needed editing that didn't get done. Both types can be accomplished with or without the aid of a computer, but there are reasons why a copyeditor deploying a word processor is likely to end up committing both."
jc-06.07.10

"On this day in 1964, T. S. Eliot wrote to Groucho Marx to confirm that he was sending a car to pick 'you and Mrs. Groucho' up for dinner."
jc-06.03.10

"Avis will never know as much about advertising as DDB, and DDB will never know as much about the rent a car business as Avis." A list of advertising philosophies assembled by the rental car company. How much was put into real world practice is anyone's guess.
sd-06.03.10

"If your chosen book fails to please you, the Biblioracle will refund you the cost of your free recommendation." John Warner knows all. Greetings From the Biblioracle at The Morning News. Live today, you tell John which five books you've most recently read and he will tell you what to read next. Here's how this all got started.
jc-05.27.10

"Exactly a century after rumours of his death turned out to be entirely accurate, one of Mark Twain's dying wishes is at last coming true: an extensive, outspoken and revelatory autobiography which he devoted the last decade of his life to writing is finally going to be published."
ms-05.24.10

Look at Me! Long CJR piece by Maureen Tkacik on writing for various places, including the Journal and Jezebel, and how things have worked out. Or maybe haven't.
jc-05.20.10

"The speed record for the nearly two thousand mile Pony Express route was set at seven days, 17 hours with the delivery of Lincoln's inaugural address. Can you imagine if the recipients of that letter opened the dust-covered envelope to find a message that only included one line: Abraham just checked-in at the U.S. Capitol." Tweetage Wasteland.
jc-05.20.10

"And no more of that talk about 'the tragedy of fame.' The tragedy of fame is when no one shows up and you're singing to the cleaning lady in some empty joint that hasn't seen a paying customer since Saint Swithin's day." Frank Sinatra writing to George Michael in 1990.
jc-05.18.10

"It has been a tradition in the village since 1633, when their ancestors made a promise to God that they would perform the play if the village was spared from the bubonic plague. They were indeed spared, and as a result they are still performing the play to this day."ms-05.18.10

"When a hundred and sixty thousand Allied troops invaded Sicily on July 10, 1943, it became clear that the Germans had fallen victim to one of the most remarkable deceptions in in modern military history."ms-05.04.10

"Maybe he's one of those deluded souls who truly think that stand-up comedians get their jokes from books, and that any comedy bit is somehow public domain." Patton Oswalt's fantastic response to a joke thief, parts one and two.
sd-05.03.10

Meet 48 Hour Magazine: "As the name suggests, we're going to write, photograph, illustrate, design, edit, and ship a magazine in two days." With your help.ncz-04.29.10

"I was sweating, my face was red, I kept putting the book down, going: This can't be this good this can't be this good." George Saunders is a Field-Tester. Find his essay and hundreds of others online or better yet, buy the book.
jc-04.29.10

"We post articles, past and present, that we think are too long and too interesting to be read on a web browser." Meet Long Form.
ncz-04.28.10

"1. When you are at your parents' house, alone in their bathroom, you pick up the Reader's Digest and genuinely enjoy the jokes they use as filler items at the ends of stories. (+5 points)" Is Country Music Right For You? A Quiz. The 12th dispatch from a guy trying unsuccessfully to sell a song In Nashville.
jc-04.27.10

"In order to be desirable, these archives depend on the creation and maintenance of a collective social collectomania: we must all become obsessives to sustain an economy founded on pushing digitised media." Collectomania, dig that. How To Build a Library from Things Mag.
jc-04.21.10

"I note 'where I was' when I learned of various notable deaths, and record any related thoughts. For the last few years, I have collected these entries into annual zines." Rob Walker's fascinating Where Were You? 2009 is available free.
jc-04.16.10

"Thou shalt accept how she clearly humors you. Do not, by any means, stare at the beckoning gap at the top of her shirt. Do not, sir, stare at her hindquarters when she retreats." Midwestament, by Matthew Roberson.
jc-04.13.10

How many DDs is it going to take to get me a KTTW to HH? Stumbled across while working on something else: common abbreviations and acronyms used by the "cast members" who work for Disney.
sd-04.12.10

"Traveling by helicopter throughout a combat zone in body armor to hear a response to an RFP is a big change from New York, Chicago or L.A." Interesting story about advertising and production in Afghanistan.
sd-04.12.10

"Just you wait, I'll become famous after I'm dead about ten years." On this day in 1977 Jim Thompson died.
jc-04.07.10

"Norris, 26 years his junior, was Mailer's fifth and final wife. In order to marry her, he was obliged — over the course of a few days — to divorce his third wife, then marry and immediately divorce his fourth." Memoirs of Mailer. Via Fimoculous.
jc-04.06.10

"Almost every seat was full. A little boy in church clothes carefully deconstructed a vanilla cone. An old man and woman sat on the same side of a table, the woman feeding the man a Blizzard." Dairy Queen, a small-town Texas institution.
ms-04.06.10

"Three decades after The Official Preppy Handbook was first unleashed into bookstores, a follow-up called True Prep is in the works — hoping to reignite preppy fervor, update the mindset and explain just what it means to be a Chip or a Muffy in a Barack world."
dw-04.04.10

"When they were published, some where bestsellers, some were considered scandalous, and others were simply misunderstood." Beautiful covers. Beautiful website. The Penguin Decades series.
ncz-04.01.10

Regarding The Deck and lots and lots of other things. Amen.
jc-03.26.10

The Tournament of Books Quarterfinals continue today. Yesterday in the comments, John Warner told people to list the last five books they've read and he'd tell them what to read next. Check out the results.
jc-03.25.10

"The math is simple: my lunch was missing for 3 nights, 3 being the first odd prime number and the second smallest prime, not to mention a Fermat prime -which Ted, you're a jackass for not catching the second time around." Missing Lunch at Wikipedia, by Jimmy Chen.
jc-03.24.10

It's Margaret Atwood versus Victor LaValle in the final first-round match today in the The Morning News Tournament of Books, presented by our Field Notes. Also, the Zombie contenders are revealed in KG and John Warner's comments.
jc-03.18.10

"The Arctic is the world's second-largest desert. The snowflakes are large and dry like the little paper circles from a three-hole punch. You can't even eat them to stay alive. They will dehydrate you. They will kill you faster than drinking no water at all." Is your workplace as rough as the Arctic?
ms-03.15.10

"This was Team USA's only major disappointment in the games, with American favorite Triage Jansen bowing out midway through the race when she realized she had to be at work the next morning an hour earlier than she"d realized." 24th Existential Olympics, by Jonathan Kaufman Nathan.
jc-03.04.10

The brackets are announced for this year's Morning News Tournament of Books (sponsored by Field Notes this year!) and it's a very tough field to handicap. Luckily, Andrew Seal has the inside dope in his Introduction to Nerdhalla.
jc-02.25.10

Ten rules for writing fiction from people who know. Elmore Leonard, "Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip." Roddy Doyle. "Do not place a photograph of your favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide."
jc-02.22.10

Status, Vol. 1. A lavishly designed compilation of inspiring, funny, say-what status messages from both sides of the Atlantic.
dw-02.22.10

"The Great Gatsby is an inspired title, one for the ages, but it wasn't Fitzgerald's idea. He wanted to call the novel Trimalchio in West Egg, which sounds like something Dr. Seuss might have dreamed up for The Playboy Channel." What makes a good title? Via MeFi.
ms-02.22.10

"(59) Tell her how you feel while you stand at the foot of the huge bed and look upon her sleeping body, while cursing yourself for being a ghost whose words cannot be heard by the living." Paul Ford's 100 Ways To Say "I Love You."jc-02.12.10

Related to the last. I didn't really get what it was about when I was eleven, but I kept going back to it, over and over again. I'm not sure I really get it now either, but here it is. The Last Whole Earth Catalog from June of 1971.
jc-02.11.10

A good read for times like right now, when I probably should be doing something else: Scott Hansen talks to other creative folk about their strategies for overcoming creative block.
sd-02.10.10

On this day in 1926, Ernest Hemingway pulled a fast one on one publisher to sign with another.
jc-02.09.10

"Advertising agency of the future sounds a bit like horse drawn carriage of the future." Amen. A thoughtful piece by Bud Caddell.
jc-02.08.10

"My stomach lurched a little when I realized that it was Salinger, for real, on the other end of the phone, speaking rather too loudly and seeming a bit confused by my voice..." Joanna Smith Rakoff on answering J. D. Salinger's' mail.
jc-02.08.10

Sumedicina, a data fiction project, that tells a story through infographics.
jc-02.08.10

A corpse, a false identity, spies galore, and a pre-Bond Ian Flemming. Reading this two part excerpt of Ben MacIntyre's new book Operation Mincemeat will have just one result: Cha-ching.
sd-02.03.10

Tangentially related to the last. The edition of Norman MacLean's A River Runs Through It designed and illustrated with wood engravings by Barry Moser is a must-have. Also, I love this photo of MacLean by Veronica C. Wald.
jc-02.03.10

Stock and Flow, a metaphor from economics smartly applied to digital creation, by Robin Sloane.
jc-01.19.10

"In the autumn of 1992, on a school-sponsored trip to Stratford, Ontario, for the Shakespeare Festival, I wandered into a used bookstore with some friends and made an unexpected find: a completely blank datebook from 1954." Three years align for Andrew Huff. Awesome.
jc-01.19.10

"As I.D.'s sole editor in New York working alongside the ad salespeople, my friend spent the next year trying to manage staff in another state whom, he complained, he had not been allowed to hire and who had never heard of Philip Johnson."
jc-01.13.10

The National Archives have built an online exhibit to tell the story of When Nixon Met Elvis. There's also a great. goofy film about the strange encounter, Elvis Meets Nixon.
sd-01.11.10

Paul Ford is this week's Non-Expert at TMN, he answers the question Is there an afterlife? If you scroll down a bit you can listen to him read it aloud. You should do that.
jc-01.08.10

Related to below: Boontling, the language developed in the late 1800s and spoken by residents of Boonville, CA. I have a translation dictionary you can borrow, if anyone's dishing to jape out to Boont.
sd-01.07.10

A forged will, bad blood, angry scholars and fans. Fascinating story behind the state of Kerouac's estate.
ms-01.07.10

This reminds me of how I'd answer test questions in high school when I hadn't studied any of the material (and why it's surprising that I still graduated, given how much I enjoyed doing it): Biography: Walt Whitman.
sd-01.04.10

"When all the elements of a camel-case compound are words that could stand on their own, slice it open: Master Card, Price Waterhouse Coopers, Word Perfect. When some elements are letters or word fragments, sew it up and capitalize conventionally: Iphone, Ebay, Fedex." The Knee-Capping of Intercapping, by Caleb Crain. Amen.
jc-12.19.09

"They apparently thought they could squish the book like a bug, but were quickly reminded what country we live in." Zulkey interviews Michael Gross, the author of one of the best books of the year, Rogues' Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money that Made the Metropolitan Museum.
sd-12.18.09

"That could even be the secret--the emotionless efficiency of Swedish technology, paradoxically combined with the wicked allure of the pitiless elfin avenger, plus a dash of paranoia surrounding the author's demise." Vanity Fair looks at the allure of author Stieg Larsson and his books.
ms-12.17.09

"This works like an advent calendar, every day from the 10th to the 24th of December a new window will open with a fresh and unsettling story behind it. To open the door click the rodent on the correct day." Terrifying Tales for Christmas. Via Things.
ms-12.17.09

A fave entry in this year's Regret the Error corrections round-up. From the LA Times, "Bear sighting: An item in the National Briefing in Sunday's Section A said a bear wandered into a grocery story in Hayward, Wis., on Friday and headed for the beer cooler. It was Thursday."
jc-12.16.09

"Eliot's manuscript title for the poem was 'He Do the Police in Different Voices,' taken from Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, where the orphan Sloppy is so praised for his dramatic abilities when reading out the crime news." On this day in 1922 The Waste Land was published.
jc-12.15.09

"I'll try to tell you what my attitude is to the stage and screen rights of The Catcher in the Rye. I've sung this tune quite a few times, so if my heart doesn't seem to be in it, try to be tolerant..." --J. D. Salinger. Via TMN.
jc-12.14.09

"How something as simple as typography can drive you toward or away from that $39 steak." Menu Mind Games by William Poundstone. Via Jake.
jc-12.14.09

Sweet Juniper's second in a series of great profiles on local businesses in Detroit: R. Hirt Jr., Est. 1887.
sd-12.14.09

"Although it topples a good many cherished myths, and does so with patent glee, it cannot properly be called revisionist for there has never been a lucid and comprehensive presentation of the Bauhaus to revise." The New Criterion reviews the current MoMA exhibit Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernityms-12.12.09

"Frontier American journalism preserved a vestige of the low-church impulse toward universal literacy whereby the new country imagined it could read and write itself into existence. We were the Gutenberg Nation." Final Edition: Twilight of the American newspaper, by Richard Rodriguez. Brilliant.
jc-12.10.09

"Acknowledging that few readers, if any, read exclusively newly published books, we've asked our regular contributors and distinguished guests to name, from all the books they read this year, the one(s) that meant the most to them." A Year in Reading from The Millions.
jc-12.09.09

"A man and a woman lie in bed at night in the short hour between kid sleep and parent sleep, turning down page corners as they read. She is leafing through a fashion magazine, he through a cookbook." Gopnik on Why we use cookbooks.
ms-11.18.09

"That's why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It's a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don't want to die." Der Spiegel interviews Umberto Eco, who has curated The Infinity of Lists, a current exhibition at The Louvre.
jc-11.18.09

"I wouldn't choose it as a font for St. Agnes Church even as a joke. Every time I go by, my vacation is, for a moment, ruined." Mistakes in typography grate the puristsms-11.17.09

"Sorry folks, the most evident way of doing something is typically the way that I do it." Frank Chimero owns up.
jc-11.16.09

"When 'The Wire' gained popularity in Great Britain, we were contacted by a London-based journalist who proposed a job swap." Two crime reporters swap beats and wrote about the experience about it over at Crime: A Tale of Two Cities. Via MeFi.
ms-11.13.09

In this online age, writing correctly can be very difficult. Fortunately the Fake AP Stylebook is at your command with great tips like "In research papers, comic books should be cited thusly: 'This was from the most kick-ass issue of The Punisher EVER!!!'"
sd-11.04.09

For the next time you're trying to spell something over the phone: the Nearly Anacrophonic Phonetic Alphabet, which "hews much more closely to the basic idea of anacrophony than any other phonetic alphabet of which we are aware." Thanks Everett.
sd-10.30.09

Tonight, 71 years to the minute, listen to the radio broadcast that panicked people all over the country, Orson Welles' War of the Worlds.
ms-10.30.09

"I realised that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding." On this day in 1958, CP hero Samuel Beckett's "Krapp's Last Tape" was first performed.
jc-10.28.09

John Irving starts writing a novel with the last line and other insights shared in this interview with the New Statesman. Hmm, really? Case in point from APFOM, "O God -- please give him back! I shall keep asking You." Via LHB.
jc-10.23.09

FoTA Edward Lifson has a great interview with Chicago-based architect/preservationist Grahm Balkany over at Metropolis. Hey Daley, pay attention!
ms-10.22.09

Related to the last. "Nitsche, however, rejected the Neue Grafik, or Swiss International Style, that drew nourishment from the Bauhaus legacy, referring to it as 'a little too cold for our uses,' and stayed 'pretty much with the classical typefaces.' He insists that 'I really never went outside of my love for Didot.'" Amen. The Reluctant Modernist by Steven Heller. A must-read.
jc-10.21.09

Alfred Nobel "had a lifelong fear of being buried alive, and in his will he left instructions to have his arteries cut after death, just to be sure."
jc-10.21.09

"Every day for one hundred days (from October 30, 2008 to February 6, 2009) I picked a paint chip out of a bag and responded to it with a short writing. I have selected my favorite forty, titling each writing with the number of the day it was written (out of 100) and the name of the color from that day's paint chip."ms-10.12.09

News that, thanks to the success of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, more literary monster mashups are in store, including Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and Little Women and Werewolves.
sd-09.30.09

"Thinking that you might be talking about a different 'Well of Cantankerous Souls,' or that the dungeon might have recently become vacant, we sent our intern Trevor to scout out the location..." Adventure Capital by Matthew Baldwin. Yeah, the credit markets are a bitch right now.
jc-09.30.09

A trailer for The Onion A.V. Club's new Inventory book, which features lots of great writing by friends of the agency and one wife of the agency.
sd-09.30.09

The next book for Infinite Summer is Dracula, with a trio of excellent guides. Perfect weather for it in Chicago today. Get on it.
jc-09.28.09

"Eclecticism was a viable and intelligent decision. While consistent design for a series of related books makes good strategic sense, these books were bound together by the editors' judgment." Covering the Good Books by Steven Heller.
jc-09.28.09

Lusting after this. John M. Carrera's Pictorial Webster's, a short-run, hand-crafted volume of classic dictionary engravings reborn in a fine-press edition. It looks positively amazing. Here's a detailed video on the project and a chance to win one from Chronicle Books. Thanks for the tip to Anthony Drehfal, editor of Block & Burin, highly recommended.
jc-09.24.09

"Below we have selected 20 phrases that may grate on the ear. It's not a definitive list. It couldn't be: he has published five novels, each around 500 pages long, and the arguments over which are the worst bits will go on for a while." The Telegraph picks Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown's 20 worst sentences.
ms-09.18.09

"Kill the pig! Slash its throat! Drink its blood!" On this day in 1954 Wiillam Golding's Lord of the Flies was published after being rejected by 21 publishers.
jc-09.17.09

The anthology I anxiously await every year and pre-order about three months early has finally been released: The Best American Crime Reporting 2009. If you need me, I'll be hiding out back, sneaking reads.
sd-09.16.09

"Making love became something they did, like bowling or playing tennis. Then it became everything. Tennis and bowling were subordinate." Key words with Peter and Jane Part 1 by Amy at Story blog.
jc-09.16.09

"Are You There God? It's Me, a Sexy Vampire." In case Claire's new young-adult novel doesn't sell here are her backup ideas.jc-09.15.09

About four years ago Charlie Hopper got the idea that he should try to write a song and see if he could sell it to Nashville. So far he hasn't. Mopping Up the Blood, Dispatch #1 from a McSweeney's columnist-contest winner.
jc-09.14.09

"It rarely takes more than a page to recognize that you're in the presence of someone who can write, but it only takes a sentence to know you're dealing with someone who can't." Josh Olson in The Voice.
jc-09.11.09

A literary term I wasn't familiar with until just a second ago: the cozy mystery, a type of story "which includes a bloodless crime and contains very little violence, sex, or coarse language."
sd-09.10.09

We Made This on the special edition do it yourself covers for Douglas Coupland's new novel Generation A.
sd-09.10.09

"After gym class, Bella heads to the office and sees Edward trying to change biology classes. She thinks it's impossible that someone can dislike her so much. I don't like her. She brags too much." Dan's blogging his reading of Twilight.
ms-08.25.09

For the ladies, fascinating article on Laura Wilder, author of Little House on the Prairie, Wilder Women.
ms-08.04.09

"Unseen, in the background, Fate was quietly slipping the lead into the boxing glove" and other random quotes from the greatest comic writer who ever lived, P.G. Wodehouse.
aro-08.03.09

Big thanks to our Guest Editor Henry Cline for all his great work here in July. Now that we've reached the end of the month, Henry wanted to share a kind of parting gift with us: the launch of his Radio First Termer Restoration Project, which is telling the story and restoring audio tapes of a pirate radio station that broadcasted out of a Saigon brothel during the Vietnam War, hosted by an anonymous Air Force sergeant known only as "Dave Rabbit."
sd-07.31.09

Related to the last, the Citizen Kane of corporate folktales, the mighty, mighty House of Wigs by Joshua Allen. For God's sake, click on the little arrows that mean "more." See you in a couple hours.
jc-07.30.09

"'You know, there are people at the office who think I got this job by sleeping with you. Isn't that horrible?' I said during a meal. He looked shocked and then laughed. 'Do me a favor. Please don't deny it.'" Carol Joynt's great piece about being one of Walter Cronkite's staff reporters. Remembering Old Iron Pants.
sd-07.28.09

Not exactly sure what this is, but very intrigued and eager to see it launched in two days: We Are The Friction, described as "an international illustration and short fiction cage match between 24 writers and illustrators (in handy book form)." Via Byrdhouse.
sd-07.20.09

"Have you ever experienced that eerie feeling of a thought popping into your head as if from nowhere, with no clue as to why you had that particular idea at that particular time?" There's science behind that, really interesting read, Disorderly genius: How chaos drives the brain.
ms-07.14.09

"In April 2009, we sent a personal, handwritten letter to each of the 467 households in the small Irish village of Cushendall. We hoped these unsolicited letters would prompt neighbourly discussion, spreading across the town, promoting community curiosity." Mysterious Letters.
dw-07.13.09

"If you find yourself in the sole company of graphic designers, this book will likely address every professional subject that might arise, giving you enough information to laugh at an inside joke or nod in knowing agreement at a thoughtful reference." Enter to win your free copy of Graphic Design, Referenced over at idsgn.
ms-07.13.09

FotA Rob Walker has just launched Significant Objects, wherein writers invent stories about objects purchased from thrift stores and garage sales and distributed by the project's curators, then later sold again on eBay with each piece's new back story.
sd-07.07.09

"I don't want to admit to being so superficial as to structure an entire Internet-wide event around a catchy title ... so I won't."
Matthew chats with the LA Times about the Infinite Summer project.
jc-06.30.09

Michael Rubin's excellent Droidmaker: George Lucas and the Digital Revolution is now available as a free pdf download. Here's a bit more on the book from The Binary Bonsai.
jc-06.30.09

"radiidin: 'non-holiday, a time allegedly a holiday but actually so much a burden because of work and preparations that it is a dreaded occasion; especially when there are too many guests and none of them help.'" Arika Okrent's 10 favorite invented words. Via Gapers Block.
fg-06.17.09

Have just discovered the work of Sue Bentley, author of the Magic Kitten, Magic Puppy, and Magic Ponies series, all of which have the brightest, most glittery covers ever. They're hypnotic.
sd-06.16.09

For Bloomsday. "Mr. Joyce manages to give the effect of unedited human minds, drifting aimlessly along from one triviality to another, confused and diverted by memory, by sensation and by inhibition, is, in short, perhaps the most faithful X-ray ever taken of the ordinary human consciousness." Edmund Wilson's July 5, 1922 review of Ulysses for TNR. "Mr. Joyce has told the whole truth."
jc-06.16.09

"Meanwhile, in the Web world, I've pretty much heard/seen enough about steampunk. And I don't need to see any more pictures of unlikely things made of Legos." Zulkey's interview with Rob Walker of the NY Times' Consumed, Murketing, and stealing the whole show in Objectified.
sd-06.12.09

"'Chapter eight,' he said. 'No, wait. Chapter nine.' When I left a few minutes later, he was on chapter ten. By the weekend, he had finished the entire work, a fourteen-hundred-page novel about foot fetishists in Malaysia." FotA Ben Greenman shares a very personal story about the dangers of Lit Juicing within the book community.
sd-06.08.09

"When the other try-outs began to arrive, I was alternately relieved (I wasn't the fattest or most socially awkward person there) and terrified (the presence of so many bad haircuts and shabby gaits was a guarantee I was up against some brilliant titans of trivia)." FotA and Field-Tested Books contributor Leonard Pierce travelled to Chicago this week to try out for Jeopardy.
sd-06.05.09

Today marks the official publication of CP alum Dave Reidy's short story collection Captive Audience. We've all been reading the advance copy and enjoying each and every page. A well-earned, hearty congratulations, Dave.
sd-06.01.09

"If you arrived late for Terminator Salvation and missed the name of the director, at what moment would you realize that you were not watching a Mike Leigh film?" Another great Anthony Lane movie review.
sd-05.27.09

"The people and the organizations that really flourish prize autonomy." Amen. A chat between two of our favorite people, Alissa Walker interviews Dan Pink.
jc-05.20.09

"So you're sitting there with the engine screaming its head off, and your ears bleeding, and you're doing only 23mph because that's about the top speed, and you're thinking things can't get any worse, and then they do because you run over a small piece of grit." Really great review of the new Honda Insight.
ms-05.19.09

"Because it is used in every e-mail address and many tweets, you might be forgiven for thinking that the remarkably common symbol @, which English-speakers know as the 'at sign,' but Italians call a 'snail,' and south Slavs know as a 'monkey,' is a fairly recent invention."
jc-05.14.09

The Reanimation Library is a small, independent library based in Brooklyn. It is a collection of books that have fallen out of mainstream circulation. Outdated and discarded, they have been culled from thrift stores, stoop sales, and throw-away piles across the country and given new life as resource material for artists, writers, and other cultural archeologists.
dw-05.13.09

So that's it. A fascinating article in The Atlantic by Joshua Wolf Shenk on what makes us happy.
jc-05.13.09

Okay FS readers, today is Buy Indie Day and we here at CP are STRONGLY ( I can use all caps cause JC is in London and can't yell at me until like 6 hours from now) encouraging every one of our readers and their friends to go out and support your local independent bookstore. So go forth and purchase my friends. You might even win a prize for it. Email me at michele at coudal dot com and let me know where you made your purchase and we'll pick three random winners and send you a Field Tested Book and Poster.
ms-05.01.09

"The importance of Beck's rectilinear, topologic 1933 diagram is widely recognized and praised by graphic designers. Many wonder why Beck never extended his ideas outside London. The answer is, he did - to the nearest major subway network to London; Paris." Harry Beck: The Paris Connection. Via NotCot.
ms-04.30.09

More info on this Friday's Buy Indie Day. Support your local independent bookstore!
ms-04.27.09

"But somehow, when Lindsay is just chatting with reporters, her lips spin silky verse like William Carlos Williams emceeing at Lawrence Ferlinghetti's birthday jam."
LiLoKu: The Rime of the Teenage Drama Queen. Brilliance, by our own KG for FSG.
jc-04.15.09

"If he - I mean the judge, not King Oedipus - had said that he had lent the car to an Australian government secret agent whom he could not name without rendering him vulnerable to attack by terrorists, Marcus Einfeld might still be enjoying his place at the top of the heap, admired by all."ms-04.07.09

"As one researcher put it, being somewhat narcissistic is like driving a huge SUV: You're having a great time, even while you hog the road, suck up extra resources and put other drivers at higher risk." A Field Guide to Narcissism. Via Look At This.
ms-04.07.09

"I've always figured the only way I could finish a book and get a plot was just to keep making it longer and longer until something happens--you know, until it finds its own plot." Terry Southern interview with Algren for The Paris Review in 1955.
jc-04.06.09

"They had lived with a bottle of Chianti between them, the scent hanging like a little purple veil between the roof and the million-candled carnival beyond --the window lights of the late office workers, piled one upon another above the river, the tavern lights that had bloomed like lilies touching each to each across the city's lawless deeps, the auto lights in one long forevering curve down miles and miles of boulevard where one dark driver after the other bore down the streets of the big night world..." Sweet Jesus, an unpublished Algren story in today's Reader, "'Entrapment."jc-04.01.09

"Did you know there's a secret daily flight from the United States to Cuba? Or, that in 1966, the U.S. government smashed a bacteria-laden light bulb inside the New York subway system?" Find out more in the Book of Secrets.
ms-04.01.09

"They didn't realise that nothing upstairs had been touched, this was how I worked, up to the elbows in papers, paints, maps, stones." A great personal essay by writer Iain Sinclair on living in the same house for 40 years. Via I Like.
sd-03.25.09

Big thanks to Nathan and the really nice folks over at Crush + Lovely for becoming a matching sponsor for the fifth annual Tournament of Books. Sponsors match up to $500.00 of wagers placed and it all goes to buy books for kids. Why don't you become a sponsor too? Just email me at michele at coudal dot com and get your name up on the list.
ms-02.26.09

What could turn out to be the greatest book of all time is set to publish in April: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, "features the original text of Jane Austen's beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action."
sd-01.30.09

"While my great grandfather hid in a rain barrel, a Ukrainian villager raped my great grandmother. Some time later, my grandfather was born." Now that's a lede.
"Family Ties" by Z. So great.
jc-01.29.09

"You are not the only person in the world with high standards and refined taste. You are not the only consumer with foresight, charm and, if we may be so bold, lovely hair." Who cares how the chips taste, they had me with the copy. Real Chips.
ms-01.28.09

"KL: Old king learns too late that two of his kids only wanted power. He and most main characters die. One just gets his eyes gouged out." Shakespeare plays synopsized into 140 characters for Twitter.
jc-01.28.09

"There was a time when this newspaper - and many others across the south -- acted with gross neglect by largely ignoring the unfairness of segregated schools, buses, restaurants, washrooms, theaters and other public place." The Meridian Star apologizes. Amen. Via The Utne Reader.
jc-01.19.09

"Regulars are your friends-by-default, the ones you hope will recognize you in a dire emergency, when, say, you're choking on a four-dollar piece of Starbucks cheesecake and hoping your family won't remember you as 'the dead guy who paid too much for dessert.'" Rosecrans Baldwin is that guy over there with the yellow legal pads.
jc-12.12.08

"A friend once suggested I order a 'water on the rocks', and not realizing it was a joke I ordered it. The bartender stared at me with a confused look. I stared back with a red face." Oh. Via Design Crush.
dw-12.05.08

So you know. Take all these "so you knows" with a grain of salt. Merlin's Real Advice Hurts.
jc-12.04.08

When I was growing up, we were lucky to have a cabin in the woods. It was rustic, not fancy but a place to relax and come together as a family. Times have changed and cabins are not what they used to be.
ms-12.04.08

There's at least 25 ways to blog, and to think I thought there was only one way.
mst-12.03.08

"Instead, the amount of data generated will rise exponentially as we create a constantly expanding record of the present, swiftly overwhelming our memories of the past." Things.
jc-12.03.08

Finalists for The Literary Review's Annual Bad Sex in Fiction award. And congrats to the winner Rachel Johnson, you earned it.
ms-11.26.08

Tangentially related to the last, commonly made suggestions about commonly made errors, and more importantly, non-errors, "those usages people keep telling you are wrong but which are actually standard in English." Which is exactly the sort of attitude up with which I will not put.
jc-11.25.08

"Or like the 'Thai style risotto,' a viscous gruel that's served with a clump of pork belly and intended, perhaps, for the Siamese twin of Oliver Twist." Really great restaurant review. Via MeFi.
ms-11.20.08

"Each month or so, we release a new issue of 'i left this here for you to read.- We then leave them in public places (such on park benches, on buses, in airports and dentists' offices...) for anyone to take--free of charge." From artist Tim Devin, i left this here for you to read.
ms-11.18.08

Star Wars: A New Heap Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Death Star. John Power's academic essay. Over the top? Sure. Fun? You betcha.
jc-11.12.08

"I could not tell you the last time I heard 'O Canada' sung in public since I do not attend many hockey games." Kate Beaton on Canadian patriotism.
bb-11.12.08

"It is, however, a sluttishness probably to be expected of someone who had to make a living after he discovered that the novels he reviewed were a lot better than the novels he wrote." -John Leonard. Via TMN.
jc-11.11.08

Pentagram's redesign of the "luxury lifestyle magazine of the Harvard elite," 02138, was just about to go to press when the publisher pulled the plug. So they posted the entire issue online. The interface isn't too swell but the mag sure looks great. Thanks Kurt.
jc-11.10.08

"On the morning of November 2, 1859 -Election Day- George Kyle, a merchant with the Baltimore firm of Dinsmore & Kyle, left his house with a bundle of ballots tucked under his arm. Kyle was a Democrat. As he neared the polls in the city's Fifteenth Ward, which was heavily dominated by the American Party, a ruffian tried to snatch his ballots." The New Yorker takes a look at How we used to vote. Via MeFi.
ms-11.03.08

On George Lois and the big idea. Designed to Sell by Steven Heller from the NYTBR yesterday. Also, as a podcast.
jc-10.27.08

"It may interest Dad to know that when Mom implemented the 'Sleeping in Separate Beds' initiative, on September 4, it was not, as she claimed at the time, because she suffers from restless-legs syndrome." Mom's And Dad's Campaign Statements, by Gregory Beyer.
jc-10.22.08

Author Neil Gaiman is on tour for his latest book, The Graveyard Book. At each stop on the tour, he's filmed himself reading a chapter of the book and posted them online. You can watch the videos for each chapter here. Brilliant.
ms-10.07.08

William Faulkner's "splendid failure," The Sound and the Fury was published on this day in 1929.
jc-10.07.08

Chris Glass' notes to the future. Good stuff, we could all hold hands more and drink less soda.
bb-10.07.08

"I don't know. I didn't set out to do it. I just went up and made jokes, and people told me that I was an anxious, neurotic Jew. I didn't sit down and think, This is a good side of the street to work." NY Mag interview with Woody Allen.
jc-09.29.08

"Now that there are no priests or philosophers left, artists are the most important people in the world. This is the only thing that interests me." Gordon Burn's smart overview of the career of Gerhard Richter. Mandatory.
jc-09.25.08

Confused in the ways of love? Turn to the Mubai Mirror advice column. Ask the Sexpert, by Jil Wheeler.
jc-09.24.08

As always, there's a fine line between "a contest" and "spec work," but this Penguin book cover design contest features some pretty impressive finalists.
bb-09.23.08

Artemy Lebedev's Mandership is published. Looks like it's only in Russian, but English speakers can find lots of common sense and uncommon opinions about design and creativity in the online archives.
jc-09.19.08

"The apocalyptic power of God has existed forever, and He's been restrained about using it, despite provocation. The apocalyptic power of science has existed only since 1945, and the A-bomb has been tried twice already." P. J. O'Rourke on God.
jc-09.16.08

So you know. Assuming you're not one of the lucky ones you might need this big list of hints for the apocalypse, including "Would You Save Your Family and Yourself, or Would You Die in the Flames?" and "How To be Invisible."
jc-09.10.08

"The moment when one meets a book and knows, beyond shadow of doubt, that that book must be his - not necessarily now, but some time - is among the happiest excitements of the spirit." Christopher Morley's great essay "On Visiting Bookshops" from 1920. Via One Good Move.
sd-09.09.08

I think I just had my moment of becoming a real Chicagoan, complete with a new found chip on my shoulder, by getting upset at this article on adjusting to life in New York: "City Fits, Eventually, for New Arrivals."
sd-08.27.08

"When my father died, the woods were thirsty from summer. If you were going to make a campfire, you would hunt and hunt for kindling that dry." On Ways of Dealing With Tripping in Public by Crispin Best. More greatness from Eyeshot
jc-08.22.08

"Mike Hummer had been a private detective so long he could remember Preparation A, his hair reminded everyone of a rat who'd bitten into an electrical cord, but he could still run faster than greased owl snot when he was on a bad guy's trail, and they said his friskings were a lot like getting a vasectomy at Sears." Winners have been chosen for the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.
ms-08.15.08

"The language is so lugubrious, like Edward Gorey or Lemony Snicket. Every tile has something, a name or a place or a word that places it firmly in the past." I Like's visit to Postman's Park to look at plaques commemorating people who died saving others. Each one feels like a Decemberists song waiting to happen.
sd-08.07.08

"Then the Child ventured forth from Israel and Palestine and stepped onto the shores of the Old Continent. In the land of Queen Angela of Merkel, vast multitudes gathered to hear his voice, and he preached to them at length." Funny piece of political satire by The Times' Gerard Baker.
sd-07.25.08

"The country was bustling with construction, redevelopment, and euros. I stayed at the newly-restored Hotel Adlon, near the Brandenberg Gate pictured on the front of my $0.75 Dell paperback edition of le Carré..." Michael Bierut is a Field Tester and will be reading at our event in NYC Monday. Join us, won't you?jc-07.25.08

"Paul informs Lisa that he was having an affair and, for some reason, it's never brought up again. Lisa doesn't care. She's too focused on the murder charge." Fabulous reviews of Lifetime movies. Via TMN.
ms-07.23.08

A big congrats from everyone at the studio to former CP'er and Field-Tested Books founder, Dave Reidy, who just sold his first book, Captive Audience, which will be released next July by Ig Publishing.
sd-07.11.08

The Ghosts of My Friends is a book in which to capture inkblots created from the signatures of your friends.
se-07.09.08

"She never ruled out marriage, but her romances always seemed to end with flying vases and cab rides across town in an overcoat and nightgown to sleep at Frieda's or Violet's." How it turned out for the Peanuts gang. Completely brilliant. Via Waxy.
jc-07.09.08

Bothering us around the table at lunch for some time whenever we see yet another ad for it, so here's a quick note to LG: if you're going to spend millions on your massive Scarlet ad campaign, it's probably wise to proof your copy before the launch. It's TVs, not TV's.
sd-07.08.08

"There's not a jewelry store in this nation that doesn't have a picture of Doris Payne in the back room with her gray-haired self." An interesting article on Doris Payne, elegant jewel thief.
sd-07.08.08

"I have just finished setting up the whole of Mr. Eliot's poem with my own hands --you see how my hand trembles." Virginia Woolf, typesetter.
jc-07.08.08

"There was no tone of thankfulness for having been spared to answer to their names, but rather a toll, and an unvoiced wish that they, too, had been among the missing." 145 years ago today.
jc-07.03.08

Aleksandar Hemon's The Lazarus Project. All the words are from the novel. Some pictures are contemporary and some historical. Mesmerizing. Via Rob Walker, who's Buying In is highly recommended.
jc-06.23.08

Increasingly opposed to the Vietnam War, Robert F. Kennedy struggled over whether he should challenge his party's incumbent president, Lyndon Johnson, in 1968. His younger brother, Teddy, was against it. His wife, Ethel, urged him on. Many feared he would be assassinated, like the older brother he mourned." An excerpt from Thurston Clarke's novel on Robert Kennedy, The Last Good Campaign.
ms-05.14.08

"There were the Russians, the Italians, even some Chinese. Together we formed a foul little congress: the United Tarnations, the Fellowship of the Smoke Ring." Sedaris on smoking. Am I the only one who hears his voice reading his work out loud as I read it?
ms-05.07.08

FilmInFocus asked five leading architect/designers to tell them what five films have inspired their own creative growth and direction.
jc-05.07.08

Related to the last: here's the story I was trying to remember from This American Life about eating an Ortolan ("Act Two: Last Meal").
sd-04.24.08

"I think advertising should be like poison gas. It should grip you by the throat, it should bowl you over, it should knock you on your ass." Adam Levy on George Lois.
jc-04.24.08

"It is no secret that the real world in which the designer functions is not the world of art, but the world of buying and selling." Paul Rand on The Politics of Design..
ms-04.24.08

"When I was on Nova I was the most arrogant person in the world. There was only one view of the world and that was mine." MagCulture interview with designer David Hillman, with lots about the highly influential 1970's British style magazine. Things To Look At has a selection of Nova covers.
jc-04.24.08

"One of the things I like about the story form is how much it can imply. Not as a kind of guessing game or some cute riddle you're playing on the reader, but in the way that situations in life imply other situations." An interview with Tobias Wolff about his new short story collection.
sd-04.23.08

The Museum of Bad Art: Masterworks, the new book from the collectors of bad, featuring such classics as Bone-Juggling Dog in Hula Skirt and Retch Like an Egyptian.
sd-04.21.08

"I'm told that you were probably never informed that I was anything other than 'missing in action.' That leaves me a lot of explaining to do." Steve Almond on the origins of Slaughterhouse Five.
jc-04.21.08

"He didn't just invent the modern detective novel, he reinvented the first-person narrator. He has been imitated so often that many of the writers influenced by Chandler have never even read him." KG on Chandler for The Oufit.
jc-04.15.08

"2063 A.D. was a book published in 1963 by General Dynamics Astronautics. The book asked politicians, military commanders and scientists to speculate as to where humanity would be, a hundred years hence, in the great push towards space." Only 200 copies were produced but Paleo-Future offers a free pdf or a reprint of the book for purchase here.ms-04.14.08

"Sure, some may call me a stalker, but I prefer to think of myself as a stranger enthusiast." Three great print ads for Barska binoculars.
sd-04.11.08

"Ever since I was a little boy and saw the girl across the street reading One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, I've known that I couldn't respect a woman with a taste for rhyme." Wonderfully funny response to Rachel Donadio's essay about books and romance in the NY Times.
sd-04.10.08

Dick Cavett's advice to the presidential candidates: "I'd urge taking the mountain of money reportedly squandered on pizza, coffee and bagels and spending it more wisely -- on a talented young comedy writer."
sd-04.01.08

"A terrific modern noir on a raw Chicago cityscape harboring too many untold stories. If you try to set it down, this book will kick you in the teeth." -- Kevin Guilfoile, author of the Chicago Tribune bestseller Cast of Shadows. . KG is spot on. Read it on the plane last week and could not put it down until I was finished. Charlie Newton's debut novel, Calumet City. ms-03.30.08

"I made an agreement with myself long ago that I would never complain about anything as long as my books were in print, and they've stayed in print. You can't cut your suit of clothes to fit anybody else." Oldish but great Jonathan Miles interview with Jim Harrison.
jc-03.29.08

Every $10 you wager in Making Book 2008 buys four new books for underprivileged kids. With generous matching donations from organizations like MetaFilter we've raised enough to buy 4952 already. But we're just getting started, ante up willya?
jc-03.14.08

On this day in 1939 the novel originally titled L'Affaire Lettucebergwas published.
jc-03.14.08

"We were riding along and listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the f*@k up." David Mamet's "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal'." There's nothing quite as wonderful as a Mamet essay.
sd-03.12.08

"There must be something wrong with us, I remember thinking. Where is the joy of youth, the carefree spirit of eternal promise? Is there something inherently depressing about our family? Then I discovered we were not alone. I discovered bershon." -Michael Bierut.
jc-03.11.08

It was a long lunch today, so here was another topic: the story of Floyd Collins, the cave explorer who was trapped for fourteen days in Kentucky's Crystal Cave. Trapped!: The Story of Floyd Collins is the book that scared the living daylights out of my 8th grade self.
sd-03.07.08

"Our area of expertise has become smaller, and there are many things that we ourselves don't know about the things we are making. That is unhealthy in a way." Illustrated PingMag interview with Living World.
jc-03.06.08

"In an era obsessed with blockbuster debuts, glamour-shot wonders, it's easy to forget great talent doesn't always arrive by forklift." A Lighter Shade of Updike. Via One Good Move.
sd-03.05.08

Every $10 you wager in Making Book 2008 buys four new books for kids. Plus, when you add in the generous matching donations from organizations like Iconfactory, your ten bucks has the power to buy 36 books. Ahem.
jc-03.05.08

"A superhero's costume is constructed not of fabric, foam rubber, or adamantium but of halftone dots, Pantone color values, inked containment lines, and all the cartoonist's sleight of hand." Secret Skin, an essay in unitard theory by Michael Chabon.
jc-03.04.08

Every $10 you wager in Making Book 2008 buys four new books for kids. Plus, when you add in the generous matching donations from organizations like Emma, who just joined up, your ten bucks has the power to buy 32 36 books. Ahem.
jc-03.01.08

Newborn: In More Ways Than One, a guest editorial at Speak Up by Valon Sopaj who was part of the team of artists behind the iconic sculpture in the center of Kosovo independence. A must-read.
jc-02.29.08

Every $10 you wager in Making Book 2008 buys four new books for kids. Plus, when you add in the generous matching donations from organizations like Daring Fireball, your ten bucks has the power to buy 32 books. Ahem.
jc-02.29.08

"The news that the train operating company called 'one' was changing its name to National Express East Anglia was greeted with relief in the railway press." A piece on branding by Andrew Martin, with implications that go beyond railways.
jc-02.28.08

"On a Wednesday afternoon last August. the beast of technology came slouching down Highway 68 through the heart of Yellow Springs, a small college town in southwest Ohio, and carried away a bit of what made Yellow Springs a little different from other places. There was no blood spilled, only ink. The Yellow Springs News went offset." The rest of the piece is as good as the lede. Clipped from Quipped.
jc-02.12.08

So, you sweat to make a film and carefully plan how you want to promote and distribute it and then somebody you don't even know decides is should be available free. As a general rule of thumb, if it's labeled as a "New Paradigm," you can be sure it's BS.
jc-02.11.08

"One author writes a story, and others post branches to it in different directions. The result is an organic, evolving story where everyone can participate." Interactive fiction writing over at Protagonize. Via MeFi. ms-01.09.08

"Fred Thompson is running for president with the enthusiasm of a nine-year-old shopping for Sunday pants."
The Huckaboom and the Obamawagon. KG and John Warner are wearing their pundit hats again for TMN. Yay.
jc-01.08.08

"...given the quick and dirty nature of Layer Tennis, the pieces should not be about creating perfect things at the drop of a hat (lord knows it takes me forever to come up with something cool) but to come up with a process that talked about the tools we use everyday, and at the same time have fun with them in a manner that client work rarely allows." Matt Owens on playing Layer Tennis. Here's his match against Jason Gnewikow. Live matches restart in January.
jc-12.27.07

"Single words are not enough, however. Ideally, there could be a set of pre-written sentences that I could simply cut and paste into short reviews. These sentences might look something like the list below." Via TMN.
jc-12.12.07

"Anyone can easily tell where is up and where is down. And most would agree that forward faces right while back looks left... Let us join together these four directions adding their vector sums to form a scheme with 8 directional rays." Artemy Lebedev's Emotion Matrix.
jc-12.11.07

"...a full account - one that takes in the downsides and the incoherencies and failures - is always more interesting, as well as truer, than a story that looks just at the high sunlit pastures." Penguins Lose the Plot by Robin Kinross.
jc-12.10.07

"It is permissible to define a category as a string of terms. For example, we might class Madame Bovary and Dress For Success under the heading of Clothing & Desire." From the Cataloguing Rules of The Interstitial Library.
jc-12.05.07

John Gruber sends us this quote, regarding today's Laboratory Conditions episode. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." –Upton Sinclair.
jc-11.28.07

"Archy writes without punctuation because he is forced to use his head to butt the keys of the typewriter one at a time, and he is not able to reach the shift keys of the machine in order to make punctuation marks or capital letters."
jc-11.14.07

"One part of the menu, described as Divo Specials, lists dishes which 'were traditionally served to visiting dignitaries and the nobility of the Ukraine'. I can only assume Ukrainians have a healthy disdain for their dignitaries." This restaurant review from the Guardian only gets worse from there. Via Defective Yeti.
sd-11.12.07

"...technology's changing so much, it would be as if a painter learned to paint with only a limited set of colors. Then every year there were more colors..." From a Designboom interview with video artist Bill Viola.
jc-11.09.07

"(36) She stands on the unpaved road with your newborn son on her breast. Even though she can't hear you over the sound of the helicopter, you're screaming the words. Six months and you'll send for her. You promise." Paul Ford on how to say "I love you," in precisely 100 different ways.
jc-11.02.07

"So, yes, beauty matters. Boy, does it matter. It is not surface, it is not an extra, it is the thing itself..." A new column in The Guardian, Welcome To Dork Talk, by Stephen Fry. Bookmarked.
jc-11.01.07

Inspired by recent news from the West, I'm rereading an all-time favorite, Norman Maclean's account of the Mann Gulch Fire in 1949 Montana, Young Men and Fire. Highly recommended.
jc-10.25.07

Jason Kottke on the final installment of Errol Morris' brilliant, enthralling investigation of Roger Fenton's Crimean War photographs for the NYT. Make time to study the whole series, starting at the beginning. Do.
jc-10.24.07

On this day in 1958, Raymond Chandler began his last novel, the never-completed Poodle Springs.jc-10.24.07

"We become a nation of navel-gazing dreamy-eyed so-called creatives who no longer consider it worthwhile to roll up their sleeves and get down to hard work to get a job done, or, even worse, who no longer deem it worth their time to bother checking out any of the stuff that anyone else has made." Michael Fallon's How Creativity Is Killing the Culture.
sd-10.10.07

"The grand title editorial designer, which I sometimes use, is a slight provocation. I am not a graphic designer, and don't aim to become one, but as a design critic and editor, I have come to regard the craft of designing as essentially the craft of organizing meaningful structure." -Max Bruinsma. Lots of good reading here. Via ManyStuff.
bm-10.09.07

"Carrying a book around in L.A is a good way to invite stares of disbelief from rubberneckers liable to view you as a strange emissary from a more literate planet..." Nathan Rabin is a Field Tester.
jc-09.24.07

Following up on DW's earlier post: isn't The World Without Us just a less angsty version of Douglas Coupland's Girlfriend in a Coma? Same basic "the earth becomes a wasteland when people disappear" idea.
sd-08.20.07

"Rick asked me if I wanted to stop in for a quick drink. Later on, he told me the proposition was a test to see if I was the kind of girl who would drink at the Billy Goat at two in the afternoon.
Turns out, I'm that kind of girl." Karen Abbott, author of the terrific Sin in the Second City, owes FotA Rick Kogan a trip to Atlanta.
sd-08.14.07

"It sits as lightly on a heavy meal as it does on your conscience," and other retired ad slogans. Curiously missing, a fave for Continental Airlines, "The proud bird with the golden tail."
jc-08.14.07

Award winning writer Alex Kotlowitz takes a look at the immigration (or is it assimilation?) debate by focusing on one small town here in Illinois, Carpentersville.ms-08.07.07

" while I'd like to tell you that I've returned with tales of some great adventure, I'm actually just here to scribble about this one book that has illustrations of someone taking a s**t on nearly every page: "The #2 Bestseller of 1992.
bb-08.06.07

"The bloguor does not have the impression to sell his heart with the devil because it chooses publicities in connection with its contents and those do not attack the visitor." Regarding The Deck, Biologeek gets it. [translate]
jc-08.02.07

"Wasn't he my earliest image of what it was to be an artist? He was very humble, I think to myself, and spoke savagely of his own work. I've always admired that, I think to myself, as if by so doing he pushes his own films away from him and lets them become something else. As though his loathing, his apparent indifference, frees them." Spurious on Bergman.
jc-07.30.07

"Adam and Eve on a raft. Wreck 'em." Nice resource on Diner Slang. Found along with a lot of other language and word resources at the Internet Eclectic.
jc-07.27.07

Vincent to Theo November, 1883. "And my aim in my life is to make pictures and drawings, as many and as well as I can; then, at the end of my life, I hope to pass away, looking back with love and tender regret, and thinking, 'Oh, the pictures I might have made!'" Seven years later, on today's date in 1890, Van Gogh shot himself in a wheat field.
jc-07.27.07

"Their task is to explode a stellar bomb, 'with a mass equivalent to Manhattan island,' on the surface of the sun. The effect will be, we are told, 'to create a star within a star,' a plan that has not succeeded since the union of Vincente Minnelli and Judy Garland." Anthony Lane on Sunshine.jc-07.26.07

Posting this '91 vid for the KLF's 3am Eternal as an excuse to repost The Manual in which the justified ancients of Mu Mu reveal their "zenarchistic method used in making the impossible happen." Comprehensive, hilarious and pretty close to the truth I imagine.
jc-07.25.07

"What does it all mean? Maybe we're happy with living in simulation. Those people who 'buy the download to listen to, but ... get the vinyl to own' are clinging to the last few bits and pieces that are no longer bits and bytes." Insightful post at Things Magazine.
jc-07.17.07

Ian Brown does some Field Testing of his own: reading The Black Box: All-New Cockpit Voice Recorder Accounts of In-flight Accidentson a plane. Can't imagine how unpleasant that must be.
sd-07.12.07

"Every drop of fresh apple juice, carefully pressed from the reddest apples, shining in colors of the cheeks of a snow-country child, is yours to enjoy in each soft and juicy Kasugai Apple Gummy." Now that's copy.
jc-07.10.07

"I think the superficial parts about geekdom are being appropriated by the mainstream, but I don't see any hipsters here in the East Village who are running out to learn how to code in Ruby on Rails just to pick up chicks." Zulkey interviews Anil Dash.
sd-07.06.07

Wound up having too many beers last night talking to John Sellers, author of Perfect from Now On: How Indie Rock Saved My Life, which is, in part, about drinking too many beers with Robert Pollard. So maybe it was appropriate after all.
sd-07.03.07

"An elderly ironist has had the time to watch enough cultural flotsam go by that he can no longer pretend that one instance of human productivity is intrinsically much more ridiculous than any other...he knows what to expect from the world, and so expects nothing more." Fantastic essay from 3 Quarks Daily: Hipsters, Prepare to Die. Via One Good Move.
sd-06.26.07

Speaking of heroes, Jim Harrison has been elected into the The American Academy of Arts and Letters (pdf) and Mario Batali threw a party for him.
jc-06.20.07

"I then start cutting --usually doing the part I am most likely to mess up on first, just in case I do, then I don't have to do the whole piece over again. But mistakes are what I like about the process. There us no way to fix it except through new choices." Cynthia Houng interviews artist and papercutter Nikki McClure.
jc-06.19.07

Another collection to love: The Book Inscriptions Project. "These inscriptions -- not to be confused with author dedications or autographs -- are personal messages written in ink (or lead or marker) and were given as gifts from one person to another."
bk-06.15.07

Relink. Start in 1957 and you won't be able to stop until you reach 1977 in Paul Giambarba's highly personal account of The Branding of Polaroid. Required reading.
jc-06.14.07

"The Royals were frugal. And traded Mike MacDougal. Chicago now employs him - He turns ballgames into kugel." Bardball, "resurrecting the connection between baseball and poetry" from FotA James Finn Garner.
sd-06.13.07

"When someone asks you for 'edgy,' what they really mean is, 'I'll know it when I see it." And this is no way to start a project." Axel and Josh fire off another perfectly-aimed pdf mortar shell, Dirty Words & Dick Jokes.jc-06.13.07

"Green is the new black." Greener Postures, "Hacking Through the Biodegradable, Zero-Carbon, Ecochic Overhype" from New York Magazine. Very funny. Via PSFK.
sd-06.12.07

Ooh, a blog dedicated to predicting the impending death of print magazines and tracking those that have recently died (and some that have come back). Who will be next in the Magazine Death Pool?
bk-06.11.07

Local note: the Printers Row Book Fair is going on this weekend and will feature loads of friends of the agency and Field Tested Books contributors, including Jonathan Eig, James Finn Garner and Ben Greenman. Not to be missed: CP's own Kevin Guilfoile moderating the panel, "Criminal Minds," tomorrow at 2:30. The full schedule is here (pdf).
sd-06.08.07

Is it a conspiracy? No, it's The Realist Archive Project -- a complete republishing of all 146 issues of Paul Krassner's classic and controversial magazine, The Realist.
bk-06.08.07

Posting to claim this coinage, as it relates to graphic design. The 2012 London Olympics Logo is part of a larger, emerging design movement which we will now refer to as The New Brutalism. That is all.
jc-06.06.07

Marriage of Heaven and Hell and other books by William Blake, all with magnificiant color illustrations and words.
vp-06.01.07

Naz brings Absenter, formerly his photoblog, back to life as a place to talk about cycling, and begins with a post about the beautiful cycling mag Roleur. Thanks for reminding me to order some back issues of that! Gorgeous.
se-05.31.07

Underware creates some new punctuation, introducing The Irony Mark. Via